Reader survey: feedback and comments

Well, it's been just over a week since we posted the Reader Survey, which is a good time to take stocks of the responses.

Thank you all who responded. It was just sheer curiosity that made me want to find out something about our readers. And perhaps our readers are also curious about other readers.

I'm not planning any formal analysis. But this is what surprised me:

It was good to see how many people responded. 126 comments, from about 120 different readers. And who knows how many other readers there are?

I was surprised to see how many of our readers are Canadian. I figured Canadians would be a plurality, but I didn't think it would be that big a majority. I guess it shows the need for a "mostly Canadian" perspective. The top economics and finance blogs are overwhelmingly US (I think we are often the most widely-cited non-US economics and finance blog). And the non-Canadians are from all over the world, with no particular clusters.

And I was surprised to see the wide dispersion of economics backgrounds amongst our readers: from those who have no background in economics to economics professors, and everything in between. And I guess that shows the level of interest in economics from non-economists.

Thanks again!

The above was written by Nick. The following is by me - SG.

I would also like to thank everyone who took the time to answer. Aside from the occasional e-mail and signed comments, we really have no idea who is reading this blog, or why. So thanks again.

I'll try to answer a few of the questions/suggestions that were made:

Explanations of some basic concepts would be nice. Providing links to explanations of basic concepts would be just as nice.

We do try to do this whenever possible, but there are times when Nick and I are responding to things we've seen written by other professional economists, so those posts are couched in more technical language. I can tell you that we do take requests: if there's a point that you'd like to see explained in more detail, let us know. Some of my favourite posts are ones where I work through the basic economics of a policy issue that is making headlines.

[R]eflections on what a economics-credible well thought out NDP economic policy might look like (some of the posts on income taxes vs. commodity taxes, and analogies to Nordic countries were quite interesting)

I promise to post something along these lines sometime this summer. This is an issue near and dear to my heart!

Would love to see a historical chart of Canadian public and private debt / gdp levels that stretches back at least to the 20's so that we can judge the size of the Canadian (yes, aggregate) debt load vs. the Great Depression and the general trend. I think Stephen promised me something along those lines once :) I've seen charts of this for Japan, Australia and the U.S. (all via Steve Keen, e.g.) but would love to see similar for other countries, in particular Canada, of course.

I can't find private debt data going back that far...

1. What are your goals in writing the blog? Are you achieving them?
2. How much time does it take? Is it something that you see as an intrinsic part of your academic role and are you (and your department) happy with the opportunity cost of that time? I notice quite a few academic bloggers start their blogs during a sabbatical or other time off.
3. How many readers do you have? Is that an important measure of success for you or are there others?

1. When I started, I simply wanted to be part of what might eventually be a Canadian counterpart to the incredibly rich array of US econoblogs. WCI may be an important node in the still-nascent Canadian economics blogosphere, but I'm still hoping that more will follow our lead. I'm always thrilled to see another new Canadian econoblogger.

2. Probably too much. So far, the blog is off the official radar as far as my employer is concerned; it doesn't appear on my activity report, and I certainly don't want it to show up on my list of assigned tasks. But I'm becoming less and less shy about it; the feedback I get from my peers is generally positive.

3. Our current traffic would put us in the top 50 of this list. Although we'd clearly like to see even bigger numbers (what blogger wouldn't?), our goal is not traffic for traffic's sake. If we wanted to go down that road, we'd spend more of our time posting on US issues, or on the minutae of the daily political theatre in Ottawa. Our ranking here is probably more meaningful - to us, anyway - than the raw stats.

Comments

[Neil]

Since you're curious about where your readers are coming from, is there a reason you're not taking advantage of Google Analytics. It's not going to tell you anything about people's economics background, but it can certainly be interesting to look at a map of visitor clusters. For a free tool, it can tell you a lot about your visitors.

[Nick Rowe]

"... is there a reason you're not taking advantage of Google Analytics."

Yes. Sheer ignorance, in my case! I'm not very tech-savvy.

[Leigh Caldwell]

Hi Nick - welcome back, I hope the canoeing had a positive hedonic impact even if no economic effect.

I'm happy to help out with setting up the Google Analytics code for you if you like.

However there's a good chance that whatever stats package Stephen is using also has the ability to break down traffic by country - most of them do.

[Stephen Gordon]

I've already signed up to Google Analytics, and Typepad does have a way of incorporating it. But before I could get into it, I got sidetracked and forgot to go back to it. Soon.

[Geoff Castle]

Hi Stephen,

For easy stats without having to do too much work, go to www.quantcast.com and just enter your website's URL on their bar. You can also discover traffic and patterns for some larger related sites.

GC

[Simon]

I didnt have time to chime in for the reader's comment survey, but I was wondering if it would be possible for you to link to your data sources more often?

There are often wvery interesting graphs that spark questions, but can't be interested because I can't seem to find the data.

Thanks!

[Stephen Gordon]

I'll try to be more consistent about that. Often, the data aren't freely available; I have to use my university to get access to Statisics Canada's Cansim data base.

[taking selegiline and phentermine together]

If you have to do it, you might as well do it right.