Solving Mysteries

On Obnoxious Blowhards today, there's finally something written that I found interesting. Namely, at the very bottom of the page, in big type, this:


Naturally, being nosy and looking for dirt, I inquired with my tech expert. And what he brought back, I'm happy to say, was interesting.

One mystery is solved: San Jose Inside is definitely part and parcel of Boulevards, Inc. The code, it seems, is part of a tracking mechanism by a company called Quantcast. And plugging that code in the right place, we learn that San Jose Inside is being tracked as part of the Boulevards City Guide Network. Along with all of Dan Pulcrano's other web properties.

Setting aside, for the moment, the implications of this (a Councilmember generating traffic, and money, for the publication that endorsed him? The lack of transparency in assessing issues that impact the Metro and Pulcrano?) - let's look at the numbers.

First of all, this network of sites gets a robust 4.1 million pageviews a month, 3.7 million of whom are in the USA. That's a lot. But, digging deeper, we see why.

You may remember that Dan Pulcrano is being sued for fraud. The reason for this is that he (according to the plaintiff) snatched up the domain MrMovieTimes.com with a promise to give money back, and then didn't. Well, today we learn that MrMovieTimes is absolutely Boulevards' cash cow, netting 2.1 million pageviews a month. This, for a site that Dan Pulcrano wheedled away from some sucker not too long ago.

Puts a different perspective on the issue. According to Alexa.com, MrMovieTimes is the 10,776th most popular site on the web. The web, as you may know, is big. So that's saying something. There's definitely some significant value that was lost by the site's previous owner.

Those numbers also mean that all of Dan's other sites bring in only 1.6 million - which is divvied among a lot of other sites. The other top generators are LosAngeles.com, SFStation.com, SanFrancisco.com and Houston.com. Metroactive only pulls in about 80,000 views a month - or just over 2500 views a day. Which is only about twice what we get, and we don't have a paper backing us up. (WillowGlen.com, in case you're curious, only brings in about 100 views a day.)

In case this information is hidden (though, as of this writing, it's publicly available by simply typing an address into your browser), here are some PDFs of the content.

• Traffic stats, overall
• Referring site statistics
• Traffic stats, by site, part 1
• Traffic stats, by site, part 2

Missing from the list, though: San Jose Inside. This may be, according to our web guy, because the code was installed wrong, hence its appearance on the front page. Dan - if you need somone competent to fix that for you, let us know.