Traffic report for the Carnival of Homeschooling - week 3

Two weeks ago I reported on the traffic for the first Carnival of Homeschooling. Today I'll report on the traffic for the third Carnival of Homeschooling. There are a couple interesting trends.

The post for the third Carnival went up Monday night just about midnight. Like with the first Carnival, I sent out emails to the participants asking them to double check the carnival. A couple people pointed out that I had not added the URL pointing to Spunky's blog. (It was a late night.) Once I had incorporated the changes I started sending emails to bloggers asking them to mention the carnival.

Site Meter reported that there was a spike at 6:00 AM (PST) Tuesday. Our guess is that a number of people came looking for the Carnival. The hits per hour dropped a bit, and then climbed fairly steadily Tuesday. Instapundit linked to the Carnival Wednesday afternoon and we got a nice wave of visitors. But I think we got much less than before. I don't currently have a way to track the exact numbers. It seems like we got around 2000 hits from Instapundit for the first Carnival, but closer to 1000 hits for the third Carnival. Maybe the Carnival of Homeschooling is no longer the new and interesting thing.

Site Meter reported that around 40% of the visitors spent at least a minute or two reading the carnival. And around 5% spent over 15 minutes. A lot of people seem to be seriously interested in homeschooling.

Technorati reports that currently 57 blogs (There are some duplicates, so the true number is closer to 45.) are pointing to the third Carnival of Homeschooling. I didn't think to check for the first Carnival, but I am sure it was much less. Many of these blogs are focused topics other than homeschooling. Some of these are political, parenting, and even fishing blogs. If we can continue to get the Carnival publicized in other areas we will get more exposure to new readers.

For the first Carnival it appears there were over 4,500 hits. For the third we've been getting close to a thousand hits a day for the last three days. I think it is dropping off a bit, but we'll probably end up with between 3,500 and 4,000 hits.

Again, I'd like to thank everyone who participated in the third Carnival, and all those who have help spread the word. It has been another success.