VCs' blogs do not appear to drive web traffic to their funds

A classmate of mine from HBS, Rob Go put up an interesting post yesterday about the relationship between venture capitalists’ website traffic and blog traffic. In short, he found that there was very little correlation between the two. I thought a graph might clarify the data:

It appears that most VCs are tightly clustered around 10,000 hits/month to their websites (Sequoia and First Round Capital standing as outliers, but excluding those, the standard deviation was ~2,000 hits). What Rob (and I) found surprising was that while blog traffic varied widely, it didn’t appear to affect website traffic.[1] If we assume that website traffic is a loose proxy for entrepreneurs’ interest in a fund (as opposed to blog traffic, which seems to indicate interest in the person writing), that seems to indicate that blogs may be building independent brands for the entrepreneurs, but it doesn’t (from this data) appear to be increasing deal flow.[2]

This really isn’t enough data to draw a conclusion, but it does raise the question for me: “If not increasing interest in their fund, what value do VCs’ blogs deliver?”

1. The best fit trendlines are all negative (i.e., a negative correlation between website and blog traffic), and statistically insignificant (R-squared<.1). This remains true even when removing the sites with zero blog traffic or when removing the website traffic outliers.

2. Yes, website traffic is a *very* loose proxy. Yes, the blogs could be delivering value by helping entrepreneurs focus on the funds more suited to them, lowering website traffic, but increasing lead quality. But, website traffic still seems like a very preliminary step in investigating a fund; I’m surprised there isn’t a stronger correlation.

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