Jeff Richards' Demand Insights

1) Visitor stats. The site gets 79,000 hits and 56,000 page views from 2,700 unique visitors each month. There are also roughly 500 subscribers to the RSS feed (click on the "RSS" button on the right side of the page), which is cool.

2) Links. Links from a search engine comprise less than 10% of visitors; of those links more than 90% are from Google.

3) Most visited posts. The three most visited posts over the past year are 1) my post on Robert Scoble's comments ("Netflix is Dead") on our January announcement of VeriSign's relationship with Adobe to focus on the Digital Media space, 2) my post "Who's Posting on Wikipedia?" about Virgil Griffith's app WikiScanner and 3) my post covering BitTorrent's February announcement that the company would offer a legitimate P2P platform for media distribution. It doesn't surprise me that these are at the top - Scoble is one of the most widely read bloggers, Wikipedia gets 40 million visitors per month, and BitTorrent is a hot topic (both pro and con) in the digital media space.

4) My posts. I'm averaging 6-8 posts per month. Not exactly prolific, but I figure the average post takes me about 20-30 minutes to write (including finding the images, links, etc.). When I visit the sites of guys like Brad Feld, I feel like I'm not even scratching the surface. (I do have 2 kids and a full time job at VeriSign, so perhaps my prioriites are in order after all...).

5) Spam in the blogosphere is ridiculous. I get anywhere from 20-30 spam items in the Comments field each day (one of the reasons you don't see a lot of comments on the blog - it takes a long time to go through all of them and look for real comments - sorry). The topics are often hilarious, and they seem to come in waves. For most of the past year, the majority have been links to sites selling Viagra, Cialis and porn. This summer I had a wave of links to sites selling Adidas shoes (huh?). Now, I'm getting a lot of links promoting music sites. I can't publish most of the comments, but needless to say many are hilarious.

6) Books. I've put up 17 "Recently Read" posts over the past 12 months, which I believe includes everything I've completed (there were a few duds I gave up on early). Not bad considering my primary reading time is while traveling (my two girls - ages 2 and 1 - consume most of my time at home). My favorites remain In An Uncertain World, The Search and House of Mondavi.

7) The name. Why "Demand Insights?" Let's just say it had to go through a corporate marketing review and that's what was decided upon - it refers to the concept of consumer demand. Not exactly at the forefront of digital media terminology, but we've stuck with it for lack of a better name (if you have one, post a Comment).

8) VeriSign Stock. During the past year, VeriSign's stock price has appreciated 52%. Correlation? Hmmmm... (YES - I'M KIDDING)

Looking back, it's been a lot of fun, and I look forward to the next 12 months. Who knows where it will lead...