It is indeed the Paywal changes that will provide us with a one-time unique opportunity. We just have to remember that none of this is an either/or. Everyone still has their place, but audiences will shift. By introducing Paywalls, there will be a shift in dynamics that presents blogs with specific audiences and talents, such as this one, with a chance to capture some of that eyeball time. In a world where attention equals influence, every distinct minute of brain activity that's focused on our material as opposed to the 1000s of alternative available (including sleep!) is of high value. Pageviews is just a one dimensional metric - but there are financial rewards to serving more ads. That doesn't drive itself. It still needs real people coming back every day, several times a day, and several pages per visit. It ain't rocket science, but if it was easy, everyone would be able to achieve it. Any site can achieve what Whaleoil has done, but they have to put the work in. As Russ said - simply being "back" to tend this blog has nearly doubled its activity. Genuine effort can equal genuine results. Just because some Ford drivers can't stand Holden, and some Holden drivers can't bear the thought of Fords, the truth is that most Ford and Holden drivers could be persuaded to drive the other brand, given the right incentives. And some would even own both without thinking it was some sort of ideological betrayal :)

The whole web metrics thing is indeed unsatisfactory. But Whaleoil is monitored by Nielsen as well. Any trickery – as suggested by your readers – would require Whaleoil to fool an awful lot of people at once. That really doesn’t pass the BS test.

But I agree with you: what does it MEAN? is 10,000 pageviews on one site of the same quality and meaning as 10,000 on another site?

I wish I could tell you.

All I can say is that the Whaleoil strategy to increase its audience “as measured by 4 separate tools” is currently 1-2 times larger than it was 12 months ago. And the pages served out to those people is 4-5 times more than we dished out a year ago.

At the risk of taking the fun out of the conspiracy theories, I’m quite happy to let you access our stats directly at any time. To quote you – they are what they are.

As to what they mean…

I’m not going there.

Another interesting stat is the number of readers participating in on-line polls. When you look at a well frequented Herald or Stuff poll, the responses are in the 4000-6000 range.

At Whaleoil this is in the 600-800 range.

Again, what does it mean?

It’s just a data point, but it does give us a ballpark feeling as to growth over time, and in a very rough sense, size of audience.

It tells me that if we want to grow Whaleoil to the point where it is equivalent to Stuff or the Herald in terms on on-line audience, we need to grow it 5 to 8 times more over the next few years.

To me, those don’t seem to be impossible targets.

All this is completely aside from the issues of hating Cameron Slater, everything he stands for, and would like him to die a painful lonely death. As you say, it is what it is. Whaleoil has its audience. And it’s seriously looking at growing it to compete directly with the brick and mortar media organisations – online.