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After Just Two Weeks

David Honig
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After just two weeks, PALATE PRESS: The online wine magazine is the number two wine site on the Internet, according to PostRank, a site whose analytic metrics account for audience engagement as well as pure page views. Here, look for yourself:

Wine sites from PostRank.com
Wine sites from PostRank.com

A week ago we were #83.  Thanks to each and every one of you, our readers, particularly our subscribers, who get email alerts when new stories are posted.

This is going to be an amazing week at PALATE PRESS: The online wine magazine.

On Monday, in the spirit of harvest, Kerry Newberry “exposes” the act of pigeage, and in the process proves beyond any doubt that Pinot Noir is clearly the Sexiest Wine Alive.

We put our clothes back on Tuesday  for the Wine Life page, but stay with the theme of winemaking as Amy Corron Power dips into what it’s like to “Crush Your Own” wine.

Wednesday brings our Spotlight to British bubbles, with Becky Sue Epstein’s English Sparkling Wine Report. Who knew!

Thursday is our usual double-header, bringing our Hot Potato and +Food Stories.  This time around they will be  The American Paradox? Wine Labels Rarely List Health Benefits, by Tom Mansell, and Big Tang Theory, by Kathleen Rake.

On Friday we will once again rev up the wine world in our editorial page, Soap Box, with Gabriella’s exploration of social media, Can Social Media Affect The Way We Communicate About Iberian Wine?

Thank you again, our readers and subscribers.  In just two weeks we are a real presence in the wine world, and credit for that goes to our amazing writers, who keep producing quality content, and our wonderful readers, who appreciate what we have to offer.

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9 Responses

  1. You guys are creating a new “trip.” May your writers keep contributing. To move to second place is quite an accomplishment in wine writing. So, just keep up the good work and those of us who raise a glass now and then will keep reading.

  5. This site is founded by people who rail against the 100-point scale and post endlessly about its absurdity, yet it’s acceptable to call yourselves the #2 wine site on the Internet, according to some bogus Postrank definition? Postrank ranks top blog sites by some lame “engagement” measurement. By calling yourselves the #2 wine site on the Internet, you’re misleading people to believe that you are larger than winespectator.com, erobertparker.com, snooth.com, and even wine.com. I’d have expected more from you! But I guess when it comes to marketing yourself (be it wine on the 100 point scale or blog engagement from Postrank data) it easy to pick the highest rank in order to sell your goods!

  6. Skeptic,

    First, thank you for the comment. I do need to quibble a bit about the comparison to the 100-point scale. The problem some people have with the scale is not the use of numbers, but the purely arbitrary nature of attempting to match taste to a specific number. PostRank uses a definable and repeatable formula which, whether you agree with it or not, takes it into an entirely different arena than the 100-point scale.

  7. It’s not OK for shelf talkers to be “shady” (http://palatepress.com/2009/09/shady-shelf-talkers-seek-to-deceive-shoppers/) when they only show the 90-point ratings, but but it’s OK for you guys to quote some nebulous engagement ranking that only looks at blogs–not content sites, wine rating sites or retailers? I like what you guys are doing and I appreciate you thanking us readers for helping make this a success (even using PostRank as a barometer of recent positive PR), but I felt someone had to call you on the “number two wine site on the Internet” comment.

  8. Congratulations on ramping up your audience engagement so quickly! I believe you got to the #1 position in the topic after this was posted, too. 🙂 (And I just got lost wandering from article to article for about 30 minutes there…)

    To clarify how the list and analysis work, the sites included in the Wine topic are all sites in our system (>1 million, all user submitted, so no splogs, etc.) that have been tagged as being about wine. (Frequently blogs, but can be any site with RSS-enabled content, so anything from a Blogger blog to the New York Times.) We don’t claim to have the entire internet indexed in there, but we’re working on it. 🙂

    Engagement scores are developed from the site’s audience’s interactions with its content — comments they leave, bookmarks they save, tweets they send, etc. The more effort an activity requires on the part of the audience, the more weight it gets. There’s more information on that here: http://postrank.com/postrank. There will always be folks who think there are better ways to rank things, but we think this one works pretty well.

    If there’s a site you’re wondering about that’s not showing up in the topic, it’s really easy to add feeds to our system, and to add feeds to topics. We’ve taken a wiki-style approach to enable the users (especially topical ones) to enrich the topics, since they’re far more knowledgeable than we are on many fronts.

    To add a new site to the system, you just have to type or paste a URL into the search bar at the top right (postrank.com), and if we don’t have it yet, the next page will tell you, and you can register to be notified once it’s been added and analyzed. (A process that starts as soon as you press Enter.)

    To add a new site to a topic, you need to sign up for an account and be signed in, and then just search for the topic (like wine), and click Manage on the right sidebar. Then type or paste the URL into the Add Feed field, click the green add button when the site is displayed (if it’s not displayed, you probably need to add it to the system first), then click the Save Changes button — and voila! The new site should appear in the topic’s list of feeds right away.

    So in cases where great wine sites aren’t appearing in the list, you can add them right away (or let me know: melanie@postrank.com). That is, if you want the competition… 🙂 Feel free to give me a holler, too, if a feed doesn’t look right or is incorrect. (I’m also @postrank on Twitter.)

    In any case, my kudos again on all your hard work (and the community’s — you guys are competitive!)

    And some free advice to “Skeptic” as well: you have a lot more credibility (online and off) when you have the… grapes to sign your name, and your opinions will be taken rather more seriously and given more consideration if you present them respectfully, minus the unnecessary snark and name-calling.

    Over time I’ve found this particular community (wine writers and aficionados) extremely active and engaged, and especially encouraging of each others’ efforts and successes. It really makes attitudes like yours stand out all the more, and not in a good way.

  9. Even though she has a vested interest, I agree with Melanie, regarding the snark from anonymous sources–on my blog, I don’t post anonymous comments because I’m uninterested in discussing in a vacuum.

    Still, the American compulsion to make a horse race out of everything is infantile at best and it casts the limelight on insecurity. Calling attention to a ranking for your online mag is comparable to shelf talking. Neither tells the exact facts.

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