How do I measure the most popular article on a blog?

[acs111]

Just want to get peoples idea on how the best way to measure the success of the best articles on a website/blog.

I'm looking at a few different options that can give each author a fair chance without being overlooked.

For instance if we just look at the most clicked on article then its not fair on articles published in months with slower traffic like January.

So should we measure the success by

a)most page visited after an article view

b)most clicked on article by month(this would be unfair for slower traffic months)

c)most shared via Social

d)article with most new visits

It would be great to get everyone's expert opinion on this.

[EGOL]

I measure popularity by number of visitors.  I look at the number who view the page and the number who enter the page from search, social media and links on other websites.

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I pay more attention to the value of  content using these metrics.....

-- visitors referred from Google search (this is evidence that the content is productive - and this can increase over time as links arrive and rankings mature - although most of my traffic is pulled from long tail keywords)

-- the ability of an article to attract links (these send traffic and drive rankings)

-- social media activity (getting slashdotted can start a traffic avalanche that can bring 100,000 visitors in a few days - stumble can send a few dozen to a few hundred per day for years)

-- brand queries such as.... "manure article on egol.com"

-- adsense revenue of the page

-- retail conversions that enter the site through this page