Understanding PerezHilton.com's Pageviews & Unique Visitors

A few weeks agon, I wrote about the trouble with PerezHilton.com as a business. Since that post, Perez Hilton 'quantified' his popular blog with Quantcast and we have more data to look at.

It's fascinating. Perez has built the 158th biggest site on the web. Thats bigger than TechCrunch (1,352), Gizmodo (250) and almost every other blog on the web. In fact, the only blog that I could find to be bigger is HuffingtonPost.com (102).

Two interesting observations from Perez's newly quantified data. First, as you would expect with any blog, traffic moves when interesting news breaks. And considering that Perez's business is based on breaking celebrity news / drama / scandals, Perez's traffic moves according to the availability of juicy gossip. This leads to massive fluctuations in traffic. The chart below shows monthly uniques which are nearly 1/2 of the late February stats. As an advertiser trying to leverage Perez's traffic, it's nearly impossible to budget marketing dollars accordingly.

The more interesting chart is daily pageviews. Most sites see big swings based on specific days and times - but Perez sees traffic swings of nearly 3x between weekdays and weekends.