Larry Cheng at Volition Capital has put together some excellent lists of top VC bloggers and top VC websites by traffic.

Obviously, these measurement methods aren’t perfect (he uses a rolling 3 month average of unique visitors from Compete), but they are directionally correct.  What I found interesting is the correlation (or lack of correlation) between website traffic and aggregate blog traffic from all firm bloggers.  I took Larry’s two more recent lists and did this comparison.  The results are below ordered by website traffic:

Fund Name – (Website Traffic / Total Blog Traffic)

1. First Round Capital – (31,632 / 28,039)

2. Sequoia Capital – (22,441 / 0)

3. Bessemer Venture Partners – (14,825 / 8,262)

4. Highland Capital Partners – (12,704 / 0)

5. Garage Technology Ventures  – (12,375 / 82,838)

6. Draper Fisher Jurvetson – (11,823 / 12,010)

7. New Enterprise Associates – (11,762 / 0)

8. Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers – (10,924 / 0)

9. Polaris Venture Partners  – (10,217 / 16,991)

10. Benchmark Capital – (10,162 / 23,084)

11. Battery Ventures  – (10,034 / 1,744)

12. Founders Fund  – (9,654 / 21,462)

13. Accel Partners  – (9,604 / 0)

14. Greylock Partners  – (9,445 , 0)

15. Centennial Ventures – (9,224 / 0)

16. General Catalyst Partners  – (9,086 / 0)

17. Summit Partners – (8,270 / 0)

18. Norwest Venture Partners – (8,198 / 0)

19. Founder Collective – (8,189 / 42,937)

20. Spark Capital – (7,834 / 15,487)

21. Foundry Group – (7,787 / 71,547)

22. Technology Crossover Ventures  – (7,503 / 0)

23. Matrix Partners  – (7,309 / 0)

24. Lightspeed Venture Partners  – (6,475 / 15,199)

25. Union Square Ventures  – (6,333 / 132,936)

Some interesting observations:

1. There are a lot of zeros.  It was surprising to me to see how many top firms don’t appear to be blogging at any scale.  Again, Compete may fail to report the traffic of some of these folks, but that probably means that scale is minimal. That said, most of the excellent firms like Sequoia, Accel, Kleiner, etc have good reach with their websites regardless of whether or not their partners blog.  I also know that at least one zero will go away with the next version of the list since David Skok started what looks like will be an excellent blog.

2. Blogging puts firms on the radar.  It’s interesting to see some relatively new firms come on the scene in recent years and build very broad awareness.  For better or worse, brands do matter somewhat in venture, and it’s always a tricky thing for a new fund to figure out how to create awareness. I think expressing your thinking openly and engaging the tech community in a dialog is a great way to do that.  It’s impressive to see Founders Fund and Founder Collective gain mind share very quickly.  And part of it has to do with one or two very vocal individuals who put their thoughts out there.  As a side note, for those of you who do not read Chris Dixon’s blog or  Dave Mcclure’s blog you are totally missing out.

3. Social media creates unprecedented reach.  Event the best known firms only get 10-30K hits on their website.  It should be no mystery why that is – the content is rarely refreshed, and it serves mostly as information and marketing pages to entrepreneurs who are researching a particular firm.  But blogging (and social media in general) expands the voice of VC’s way beyond a bio and list of companies. It’s content that’s actually helpful and appeals to a much broader audience.  Union Square Ventures for example has over 100K uniques, 20x the uniques on their website.  And the richness of their content justifies it (for example, see Fred Wilson’s new series on MBA Mondays).

This last point makes me think more broadly about the reach of VC’s on the internet.  Stay tuned as I pull some additional data together.