Ten years -- a bit of blowing my own horn

Some blogs such as Crazy Eddie and Politics Plus post regular digests of their statistics, which give a glimpse of what interests their readers and where those readers are drawn from.  I haven't ever done that, but having just reached my ten-year anniversary, I took a look back at the whole history of the blog via the stat counter, out of curiosity.  (Actually the stat counter doesn't go back the whole ten years, but readership earlier than that was very low, so it's pretty representative.)


Most-viewed posts -- the top ten posts in number of page views were:

#10 Demographic delusion.  My tenth-most-viewed post was one of the few political ones on the list, refuting a right-wing claim that turned out not to be particularly lasting or widespread.

#9 The reason for the season.  Christmas is an ancient Persian and Roman holiday with a few pagan Germanic trimmings -- nothing to do with Jesus.  Who knew this would strike a nerve?

#8 The religion of exclusion.  The Christian Right campaign to shun gays is a loser whether they win or not.  Glad to see this attracted attention.

#7 Obamacare will be a disaster -- for the Republicans.  From late 2013.  With all due modesty, I think it's turning out to be an accurate forecast.

#6 Quotes for the day:  funnyman and freedom fighter.  A brief tribute to British satirist Rowan Atkinson was my sixth-most-viewed post.  Some "big" site must have linked to it, though that completely escaped my notice at the time.

#5 What the NRA gets right -- and wrong.  Many fellow liberals don't like what I have to say about guns, but at least a fair number of people found this worth a look.

#4 The fury of wingnuts scorned.  From just before the 2012 election, which the poll-unskewing righties were still convinced they were going to win.  Perhaps readers stopped by for a little before-the-fact gloating?

#3 I hate this man.  Not at all my best work, but somebody on Reddit linked to it, and that made it my third-most-viewed post ever.

#2 Long war, decisive battle.  One of my posts on the deeper issues, and the one I'm most glad to see was popular.

#1 Cultural nationalism.  It surprised me a bit that this was my most-viewed post ever, but it's not a bad one to have in that position.  It does make some important points which I don't see widely expressed.

If I had to choose just one post on this blog as being the most worth reading in my own opinion, it would probably be The culture war is world-wide, though it didn't make the most-viewed list.  I've written a total of 3,208 posts, but frankly that number is much inflated by the fact that early on, whenever I found something interesting on the net, I'd do a one-liner post just linking to it.  That's why I now do the weekly link round-ups.  I almost never go looking for things to include in them; rather, I'm always running across items of interest, and the round-ups let me pass them along without cluttering up the blog with innumerable one-liner posts.


Top traffic sources -- The top ten sites from which people came here were:

#10 Yahoo search

#9 Google Canada

#8 Reddit

#7 Vampirestat.com -- I'd never heard of this, and it doesn't seem to exist any more

#6 Google UK

#5 Horizons

#4 Progressive Eruptions

#3 Infidel753 itself -- I guess this means people were viewing the main page and clicked on something else on the blog

#2 Crooks and Liars -- doubtless because I'm regularly linked at the "Mike's Blog Round Up" feature

#1 Google

Notice that #5 and #4 are one-person blogs just like this one.  Bloggers' links to other sites do make a difference!  The top ten Google search terms that brought people here were:

#10: "important things that happened in 2006"
#9 "infidels 753"
#8 "calenche ranae manos" (?????)
#7 "things that happened in 2006"
#6 "infidel 753"
#5 "arthropod"
#4 "title"
#3 "eurypterid"
#2 "eurypterids"
#1 "infidel753"

#5, #3, and #2 are explained here, and I guess a lot of people see something I've written elsewhere on the net (I use the name "Infidel753" almost everywhere) and look me up.  Aside from that, I'm baffled by these.


Readers by country -- the top ten countries from which I've had page views:

#10 China
#9 Poland
#8 Australia
#7 Canada
#6 Ukraine
#5 Germany
#4 United Kingdom
#3 France
#2 Russia (probably meaningless)
#1 United States (58% of total page views)

China is the most surprising entry, given its government restrictions on the internet and relatively low per-capita computer access, plus the fact that I seldom write anything relevant to that country.  The UK, Canada, and Australia are the most populous foreign countries where English is the main native language, so I'm not surprised to see them on the list.  France and Germany are rich, internet-savvy countries where many people can read English (though I'm a little surprised that I've had more views from France than from the UK), and Ukraine and Poland have been getting more that way since the Soviet Empire fell.  I may well have some actual readers in Russia, but it's hard to tell how many.

I'd be curious to know what other bloggers' readership patterns are like.