Who is Top Author?
Picture this situation: you’re an author on a popular blog that’s published by several users; you’re wondering which author is getting the most views… Well now you can find out.
Today we’re introducing a new panel to your stats page, Top Authors.
Here’s how it works: all the posts that were visited during the day are counted up, divided by who wrote them. The author with the most visits across all his or her posts of the day, gets the top spot. Interestingly, the top spot is not about who wrote the most posts, it’s about which author wrote the posts that got the most visits.
To see each author’s posts, you can click the little plus icon to expand and reveal just what stories earned them their points of the day. Pictured above, the wonderful Jane Wells had just posted about the exciting new WordPress 3.1 features. Because that was a popular post, it earned her the top spot.
At this blog here, we don’t actively compete for the top spot (or do we!?), but other blogs might find these statistics mighty fascinating.
Because we liked the grouping feature so much, we also added it to your referrers box, which now bundles up links from the same domain.
The new panel is available for all blogs on WordPress.com. It will appear automatically if you have two or more authors with traffic on their posts. In the not-so-distant future, “Top Authors” along with the new look for stats, will be available for self-hosted blogs running the Stats plugin.
December 2nd, 2010 at 10:12 pm
I have this on my wordpress (self-hosted) but I don’t have the top authors within the stats.
I have the newest version of the plugin. Any reason why?
December 3rd, 2010 at 10:06 am
We’ll look in to that. We haven’t yet officially rolled out the new stats for self-hosted users yet, so I’m a bit surprised you have it.
December 3rd, 2010 at 6:51 pm
really good idea
December 3rd, 2010 at 8:21 pm
healthy competition…
December 3rd, 2010 at 9:44 pm
i am a top author about ADHD history and maybe schizophrenia etiology.
December 4th, 2010 at 5:06 am
I hope some day I’ll be in this list, because at the moment I have zero traffic to my blog:D
December 6th, 2010 at 11:00 am
Be aware that the list specified in this post is internal to *this* WordPress.com blog. It’s not a toplist that bloggers can compete for. It is a statistics feature *only*, and it is individually available on multi-author blogs.
December 4th, 2010 at 5:29 pm
It is indeed a better option to lead forward
December 4th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
This looks very interesting! I’d like to be a top author.
December 5th, 2010 at 10:28 am
Great idea, well done!
December 5th, 2010 at 7:15 pm
‘Top Authors’ new panel is a great grouping feature.
December 6th, 2010 at 2:02 am
Тhere is something to strive for.