DinnerReviews.com isn't Worth it

About a year ago, we got a message from the editor of dinnerreviews.com. As happens from time to time, he had mistakenly thought he was contacting a restaurant with our contact form. In the message was a sales pitch for a "live link banner" and a review of the restaurant. Part of the pitch was the claim that the web site gets 10,000 visitors a day, which is a lot of traffic. At the time, I didn't think much of it. I figured it must be a pretty big site. I happen to know the owner of the place he was trying to contact, so I forwarded the message to him, and he told me that he knew House well and that he wouldn't buy advertising from him.

Email Received From Tom House

I didn't understand why a local restaurant would want to advertise on a site that claims to get traffic from 137 countries; that's not really a good thing, unless you can verify that the hits are from people planning vacations and not rogue search engines and scrapers.

I've been busy with some other things the past few months, but recently I've started to get ready to launch some marketing tools, so I've been looking at some competitors. I'd never even really looked at dinnerreviews.com before. But when I found out that they charge over $200 a month with a 6 month minimum to advertise on the site, plus a "posting fee", I decided to take a look. When I saw how small the site was, and how few reviews they have, I knew something was amiss. The idea that a site with a handful of puffy reviews and bad videos could gain any interest at all is just against everything that I know about the internet.

And the claims of 10,000 visitors a day were made throughout the site.

Dinnerreviews editor

On their advertising page, the main graphic claimed that your ad would be "seen by Millions".

Dinnerreviews advertising

The Problem

Knowing what I know about how things work, I didn't think there was a chance in hell that dinnerreviews.com was getting 10,000 visitors a day. It's just not plausible for a site with virtually no fresh content and poor Search Engine placement for the restaurants they've reviewed to be getting any organic traffic at all, much less 10K visitors a day. Other evidence was that they only had 118 facebook likes in over a year and they were only getting 20-30 views PER MONTH on the videos that were part of some of the restaurant reviews.

I searched some of the sites that estimate traffic, and I couldnt find any evidence that they had very much traffic.

Dr alexa

A so-called "global" site should get some ranking in Alexa; the notation "No regional data" indicates that they don't have enough traffic from the US to even give them a ranking. This doesn't tell you anything specific, but a site with 10K visitors per day for the last year wouldn't have eluded Alexa altogether.

I looked at a few other sites, and the ones that could even register a number at all were similar to showstat.com:

Statshow

While these estimator sites aren't very accurate, they're more likely off by a factor of 3 than a factor of 100. The Claim of 10,000 visitors a day was ridiculously in doubt.

The Lie, Exposed

In response to the article, House posted his web site stats for the past year, which you can see in his comment below. It's likely just raw stats from a web log, without the robots, scrapers and spammers filtered out. Clearly he posted these without conferring with his lawyer, because the stats clearly show that even if you use the completely unfiltered stats, there are no where near 10,000 visitors a day, and there is no way that anyone could actually believe that "Millions" would see an ad on this web site. Even a complete birdbrain can't think that you could have more "visitors" than you have page views.

I asked him to post his google analytics results, because that's what the rest of the world uses to track visitors; you can tell from the page source of the site's home page that they have Google Analytics installed:

Code on DinnerReviews.com Home Page with their GA Account Number

It's likely that GA paints a very different picture of the web site, and he doesn't want anyone to see the real stats.

The Result

House has removed the false claims from the site, replacing "visitors" with "hits" in some cases, hoping that uneducated potential advertisers won't know the difference. He's also removed the claim that "Millions" would see an ad on the web site.

What's a "Hit"?

You hear people say that they got "a million hits" on their web site, but what does that really mean? Most people think it means that a million people viewed the site, but that's not what it means. A hit is a request from a browser for a file. A page is an organized representation of multiple files; each picture or graphic is a file, the stylesheet is a file, etc.

Take the simple example of a page named index.html with 2 images, no stylesheet or javascript. In order for the browser to display the page, it gathers the files from the page and then displays the page according to the markup (the HTML). Such a page would generate 3 hits; 1 for the main text file, and 2 for the 2 images.

Modern web pages have many elements; buttons, icons, banners, stylesheets and javascript files. DinnerReviews.com has 48 images on their main page, 13 javascript files and 8 stylesheets. So including the text of the page file itself, a real browser that views their main website page will generate about 70 hits. Browsers that have previously visited the site recently will "cache" some of the files, so fewer hits will be registered for repeat visitors. As an example, InsideFortLauderdale.com generates roughly 43,000 hits for 1000 unique visitors.

Search engine robots, however, don't read all of the elements on the page. While some may care about the images, usually they just read the text. So if you have a hit to page views ratio that is much lower than it should be, you can surmise that much of the "traffic" are not real people; or are repeat visitors (as the elements will be cached). DinnerReviews.com has a 5 to 1 ratio of hits / pages, which indicates that most of the views are not real web browsers.

The Conclusion

As someone who has been involved with the internet, ISPs and web development for 20 years, I have a pretty good handle on how it all works. Based on the stats posted by House and all of the statistical evidence I've seen; including the fact that I do a lot of googling for restaurants and I've virtually never seen it in any search results, I'd say that advertising on this web site is virtually worthless. Without real statistics about who is viewing the pages, there's no way to estimate how many potential customers might see your ad.

A prudent business person will do their own research and ask the opinions of other more technically knowledgeable people before buying advertising. In my opinion, you'd be wasting your money buying advertising on this site. If you're considering it, I urge you to seek other opinions from internet professionals that you trust.

(Original Article Published in August 2012. It was updated September 29, 2012 and again on March 29, 2013).