What does an Izea Real Rank Really Mean
Posted in Blogging by jspirko on February 5th, 2008 
I have commeted on both the Positive Aspects of Real Rank along with the Negative Aspects of Real Rank. If you read my negative post you will recall one of my issues was that for advertisers buying posts via PayPerPost/IZEA they specify RealRank in terms of 1-9. Where a blogger with a real rank of 9 is in the top ten percent and one with say a rank of 1 is in the bottom 10%.
However if you go to IZEA Ranks and check out this blog you would see my Real Rank today is 187 at the time of this post and 199 as a weekly average. What does that mean? Well by the fact that I can get top 10% opportunities from PayPerPost I know I am top 10% so Comtech News has a Real Rank visible to an advertiser as a 9 or as high as you can get. In trying to figure out exactly what 187 means other then being the 187th most trafficed blog in the system I took a look at the published top 100 Izea Ranks. Here is what I found
Ogizmo.com is number one at the moment but they don't let you see their stats.
mon-blog-sexy.com - Warning Adult Content is listed at number two with the following - Average Daily Page Views this Week: 12,142, Average Daily Unique Visitors this Week: 2,430
pjlighthouse.com is the lowest ranked of the top 100 to disclose stats and is ranked today at 95 they have the following stats this week, Average Daily Page Views this Week: 1,030 verage Daily Unique Visitors this Week: 216.
It is interesting that my Real Rank is 187 with a average visitor count of 240 in the past week better then PJLightHouse.com at 95 but their page views move them into the top ten. The formula is no secret for Real Rank by the way it has been published on the IZEA Blog. No the issue for a blogger is there is no way (Until Now) to know where you stand in relationship to the rest of the field. Why? We do not know the total number of blogs in the system.
So if say there are 2000 blogs in the system a Real Rank of 200 or better is a "9" (top 10%) but if there are say 1000 blogs in the system a real rank of 200 is only an 8 or top 10%. I am not sure why Izea does not publish both your over all rank and your single digit ranking numbers. Ted Murphy (CEO of PayPerPost) actually commented here on this blog that they planned to. Yet for now a blogger with a real rank of say 486 is left wondering where they fall in the system. 9?, 8?, What? No way to know with out knowing the total number of blogs in the system.
This got me thinking! If a person created a blog that was brand new and had zero traffic then the Real Rank of said blog would be somewhere very close to the total number of blogs in the system.
AH HA! So that is what I did and the blog today has a Real Rank of 6236. Now the problem was I used a domain that I had a site on at one time and the site actually had 7 visitors so it is probably not the very bottom but best guess is Izea has somewhere between 6300-7000 blogs in the system now. So if that is the case a blogger can figure out pretty close where they are at. IZEA is probably not releasing this information for the time being because that number is relatively small in Internet terms.
I plan to now set up another blog that is devoid of all traffic and will keep an eye on its Real Rank and post on occasion and if Izea ever releases the total number of blogs we will see how close I am.
Popularity: 8% [?]
John Hunter said,
February 6, 2008 @ 9:28 pm
Thanks for the post. I hope Izea rank turns out to be a good measure. I would like another useful tool to see where sites and pages rank. I wrote about the problems with the recent changes to Google’s Displayed PageRank. I actually tried to add the tracker to my blog after Izea made it available but errors with their system prevented it. I got an email from them that they fixed the problem but haven’t taken the time to try again yet - maybe I will now.