In the spirit of openness and transparency and "does anybody really care except me" I've included some blog hit statistics below for 2010. These stats are from the Google Analytics application that ScienceBlogs has installed.
For 2010, this blog got 77,630 visits and 91,022 pageviews. To put it all into perspective, to say that this is a fairly insignificant portion of the total traffic for ScienceBlogs is a bit of an understatement. There are defunct blogs that still generate more traffic.
Here are the numbers in graphical format (click to see full year):
And by month (click to see full year):
It's nice to see the numbers growing over the course of the year. I think it's fair to say that it took me a full year after my May 2009 move from my old Blogger site to ScienceBlogs to recapture the traffic I had at the old site, largely due to the lost googlejuice from relocating.
For some context, my last complete year at the old site was 2008 and the numbers for that year were 56,593 visits and 73,212 pageviews. For 2010, even though it hasn't been updated in nearly 2 years, the old site still got over 16,000 pageviews.
So far in 2011, as of February 23rd, I have 18,421 visits and 21,870 pageviews. It's nice to see that this year is trending quite a bit higher than last year at the same point. I may end up surpassing several defunct blogs.
As for 2009, since that was the transition year with traffic at both blog sites, the numbers are hard to judge in relation to 2008 and 2010 so I won't even bother trying.
Here are some pageview stats for some individual pages.
Top 15 Posts (non-Friday Fun)
- Best Science Books 2009: Library Journal Best of 2009 Sci-Tech Books (3758)
- Best Science Books 2009: The top books of the year! (1824)
- Librarians vs. Nature (1337)
- A teachable moment (1129)
- Best Science Books 2009: The Globe 100 (996)
- #ArsenicLife #Fail: A teachable moment (973)
- What do students want from their libraries? (887)
- Is computer science baseless? (723)
- The inherent insularity of library culture? (644)
- Best Science Books 2010: New York Times Notable Books (617)
- Scientists vs. Engineers (592)
- Scholarly Societies: Why Bother?
- My Job in 10 Years: Social Media and the 21st Century Classroom (585)
- Best Science Books 2009: Scientific American (563)
- Best Science Books 2010: The Economist (554)
Some Honourable Mentions include the "index" post at 13,877 and the tag post for Best Science Books 2010 at 1902.
Comments: Overall, a very good year. I'm quite pleased by the posts that have made it to the list, they all seem like good examples of the kind of topics I cover and the kind of writing I do. It's also very obvious that the end-of-year coverage I do of the best science books lists is very popular and that it's something I should continue. For perspective, the Best Science Books 2010: The top books of the year!!!! has some 1877 pageviews as of this moment. The very recent and quite popular A stealth librarianship manifesto already has 1087.
Top 5 Various Fun Posts
- Friday Fun: Historians Admit To Inventing Ancient Greeks (1515)
- Friday Fun: Epic failures: 11 infamous software bugs (1012)
- Thursday Zombie Fun: Braaaiiiinnnnsssss! (865)
- Friday Fun: 5 Terms Social Media Douchebags Need To Stop Using (652)
- Friday Fun: 5 Signs You're Talking To A Social Media Douchebag (618)
Top 5 Book Review Posts
- Reading Diary: The Walking Dead, volumes 1-12 by Robert Kirkman (763)
- Reading Diary: Your hate mail will be graded: A decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 by John Scalzi (397)
- Jenkins, Mark Collins. Vampire forensics: Uncovering the origins of an enduring legend. Washington: National Geographic, 2010. 303pp. (395)
- Christensen, Clayton M. The innovator's dilemma. New York: Collins Business Essentials, 2006. 286pp. (288)
- Review of: Makers by Cory Doctorow (286)
What's left to say? Thank you all very much for your time and attention. I truly appreciate all the wonderful connections, ideas and opportunities you and this blog have brought to me over the years.
See you around the Internets!
- Log in to post comments
Google stats doesn't count RSS feeds though. I've followed your blog since you moved to Scienceblogs, but I read all of it through my RSS reader which means I'm pretty well invisible, stat-wise. And defunct blogs get removed from the feed list. So your absolute (and possibly relative) numbers are likely quite a bit better than your data indicates.
Oh, and good blog, by the way ^_^
And, at least during the brief period I was on SciBlogs, HTML errors within SciBlogs' surrounding code meant that most pageviews weren't recorded by Google Analytics anyway--it's incredibly strict about that.
When I briefly had Analytics running on my own blog (on LISHost, not SciBlogs) alongside Urchin, which analyzes server logs, Urchin pageview numbers were at least 10 times as high as Google Analytics numbers. I'd guess your real numbers--even apart from RSS--are much better than indicated.
Hi Janne, thanks for your kind words. I know there's some way to get subscription numbers out of GR but I have to say I'm not interested enough to bother.
The nice thing about the hit stats, even if they understate significantly the total "reach" of a blog, is that they give some indication of what works and what doesn't, at least from a googlejuice point of view. I'll admit it doesn't tell me what kinds of posts subscribers might prefer or dislike but I'm not sure if there's an available metric that gets at that.
The exact size of my audience doesn't interest me as much as the very fact that one exists, that what I do does find an audience and that some people at least seem to find value in what I do.
Of course, I'm in academia so the blog plays a role in my place in the academic librarian reputation economy which I think is modest but somewhat significant.
Walt, I agree that GA is imperfect but it's not so much the actual numbers I'm interested in as the trends over time.
I somewhat prefer to be more read rather than less read over time and GA seems to be giving me numbers that show that direction.
Well, yeah, they're interesting. This one's just about stacks of dead flat trees.
</snark>