“WUWT Status report – 40 million” Anthony Watts blows his own horn over his web stats, claiming the status of “the most visited climate science blog in the world” and in the process admits that he’s “resorted to posting a lot of press releases rather than analysis and commentary” owing to “a period of exhaustion and illness”.

Yet somehow in spite of this elevated status traffic has slowed to about half since December, his revenues are down, and he’s going to have to start posting more ads.

Joe Romm over at Climate Progress handily dissects Anthony’s statistical “trick”. “Memo to Watts: “Hits” are what people use when they want to hype or inflate their webstats.” The only stat Anthony provides in support of his claim is a dubious Alexa statistic for “Daily Reach”. 40 million total hits also doesn’t seem to hold up so well to Climate Progress’ own stat of 20 million in the first three months of 2010, but as Joe says “hits” are a deceptive benchmark.

This stat doesn't look as good as the one Anthony touts...