According to WordPress.com, my blog had 60,609 views and 35,810 visitors in 2017 (down from 68,443 and 42,499 in 2016). The reduced viewership is not too surprising, as I posted only 114 blog posts in 2017, rather than the 200 of 2016. (My biggest year was 2014 with 116,359 views and 69,179 visitors.) I don’t know how much the decline in my readership is due to a general decline in how much people read blogs and how much is specific to my blog—I’ve not been able to find good statistics on the readership of “average” blogs.
Here are my year’s most-viewed pages (almost all of which are from previous years):
2017-01-01 to 2018-01-01
I think that there are several reasons that old blog posts dominate my views:
- Most of my viewers (other than subscribers, whose loyalty I really appreciate) come via search engines. Of the 60,609 views, 33,202 were search-engine referrals (55%). Search engines will favor long-established pages that many people have clicked on in the past. My next highest referrer is Facebook (which I don’t use) at 195 viewer—a tiny number in comparison.
- My recent posts have been more specialized than older ones, so have a narrower audience.
- I’ve been less active recently in calling attention to my recent posts on mailing lists and blog comments.
One good trend is that the most popular posts are now mostly contentful ones, rather than ones that are just links to other sites.
I don’t get any revenue from my blog (but I don’t pay anything for it either). The clicks from my blog mostly go to other of my blog posts (1259), Digikey (1229), AliExpress (179), and LeanPub (175). The average cost per click for advertising is 50¢–$2, so Digikey and AliExpress probably should be paying me, but they aren’t. (Of course, the click rate would probably drop way down if I was being paid to push products, rather than just providing links to things I have bought and used or am thinking about buying.)
My top commenters (based on the last 1000 comments, so several years’ worth of comments) are
Commenter | Comments |
---|---|
399 | |
114 | |
50 | |
31 | |
26 |
My comments are mostly pingbacks caused by links to older posts for continuity, though some are replies to other commenters. I’d like for my comments to be about 25% of the total, rather than 40%, but I’ve not had much success in getting my lurking subscribers and followers to say anything. If each of my followers made just one comment a year, the number of comments would quadruple. Questions, corrections, and suggestions for blog posts are particularly welcome.
I admit to being somewhat envious of bloggers who have active discussions among their commenters—my readers don’t seem to have formed that sort of on-line community, perhaps because my posts are not open-ended enough or because I wander over many different topics rather than staying focused on a specific niche, so the readership may not share many interests with each other.
For those who have been commenting—thank you! It really helps me to know that people are reading my blog (and raw numbers don’t really do that—I can’t really tell whether viewers coming in from search engines are reading what I have to say, or just clicking on a link and deciding it was a mistake).
International Blog Delurking Week
Tags: blog, blogging, comments
Delurking badge, copied with permission from http://www.stirrup-queens.com/2016/01/international-blog-delurking-week-2016/
Thanks to xykademiqz’s post, I just found out about “International Blog Delurking Week”, which runs 2016 Jan 3–2016 Jan 9. The tradition seems to have started in 2005 (at any rate, there are a lot of Google hits for “delurking week” and 2005, but all the top ones for “delurking week” and 2004 are from later years).
The idea is a simple one: ask lurking readers to step out from their silence to make a comment, even an inane one. Like most blog writers, I get few comments, and it sometimes feels like shouting in a large empty building—there are a lot of echos, but no one there to hear what I say.
Many of my views come from search engines and people passing on links to specific posts, but I don’t really know who is coming to my home page or reading on an RSS feed, aside from the handful of folks who comment regularly. (And a big thanks to them—it helps me believe that my audience contains real people, and not just spider bots crawling the web to link to my posts.)
Tell me something about yourself: are you a student? a faculty member? a home schooling parent? an electronics hobbyist? …
What would you like me to write more about in the coming year?
You can post anonymously if you are shy—I don’t need to know who you are in real life, just who you are as my blog audience.
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