Vladville Stats

As you may have noticed by the flurry of blog posts and my cheerful mood over the past week, things are really starting to pick up. OWN is back on course, with lots of work ahead, my personal projects are picking up, spending more time with Katie is just awesome and the amount of support I have received from a few of you has been nothing short of amazing. So I wanted to take a moment to share something I have learned, because quite frankly, it surprised me.

Here are the stats from the recent Vladville survey I ran, and much to my surprise my audience is not just a bunch of IT shops. As a matter of fact, its almost the smallest one. That was the first surprise. I immediately thought, “man, these people must hate my guts, why do they bother reading” but the comments answered that quite vividly.

Vladville receives over 80,000 unique visits per day, over quarter million RSS hits (impossible to find out how many people just have a broken RSS reader that requests the feed every minute). Of those, 41,998 bothered to look at the survey page, of which 36,701 actually answered it. By number breakdown alone, most visitors to Vladville are smallbiz companies, followed by employees of midmarket or larger companies. Why read Vladville? Primarily for technical info but also for business advice. 

Those are the flat numbers. Now, here is another curveball. When split individually, the smaller audience segments (student, smallbizit, smallbiz and a good portion of midmarket) come here primarily for technical information. The larger organization employees (enterprise and nearly half of midmarket) comes here for business advice.

The only inference I can draw is that techies from larger companies are looking to go out on their own and are looking for business insight, while the smaller company employees are here to figure out the big picture. The comments, which I honestly have only read maybe 700 of, seem to confirm this.

Something universal among everyone (or just one person submitting the form over and over with slighty varied comments) is the appreciation for keeping it real, without sugarcoating and pretending things are not something other than whats in the plain sight. That seems to be the most apparent criteria to you all. The second biggest trend among the comments is the number of thanks I got for helping people put a mirror up to themselves, identify themselves in what I’ve had to go through and face their problems now. While I am sure there are quite a few that probably see me as just a rude asshole who gets off on throwing insults on the random web site, a LOT of you seem to be getting the right message and the spirit in which I post some of these blog items. Yes, they are a plea to change and help you understand that everyone struggles, every day, that this is not easy or a hobby..

One of the things I say very often when people confront me about the overall lack of respect and appreciation customers send back is: “They are paying us for our expertise, we’re professionals not support group participants”; As a result of this survey and its tremendous feedback I am going to have to change that tune, while Vladville is not my job (as a matter of fact, it is just a venting distraction from it) I appreciate hearing what a big positive impact it has made in so many of your lives and careers and I can’t even begin to express what it means to me that this tiny little blog has such a huge following and so many fans. In my line of business you don’t get to have fans, knowing that there are so many of you out there that appreciate what I’m doing is truly a blessing.

Thank you for your support!