About the readership of this blog, examined through the very imperfect lens of WordPress statistics. Back in May 2016 AZBlog had accumulated 5 million spam comments (since late December 2008), and WP said I was getting about 1000 views a day. Then reported spam comments dropped to about 100,000 a year and reported views to 750-800 a day, leading me to wonder if I was doing something wrong, but friends convinced me that WP’s monitoring was simply screwed up.
And then, about two months ago, the views per day went back up to 1000-1200, reliably, so I stopped fretting. (Spam comments stayed down at the ca. 100,000/yr level, which I view as a blessing.)
More interesting is which postings get the most hits, and from which countries. Some of this is easily explicable — there’s a big market for sex — but some is bizarre; Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky tells me it’s probably bots ruling the netverse, and not much to do with me specifically.
Here’s a recent daily report:
What’s viewed (postings and pages). My home page / archives page almost always tops this list by far — this is where peple go to find other things — though there was one day a while ago when a little posting of mine on the durian fruit (from 9/12/16) got hugely more hits, and occasionally “The body and its parts” (from 11/30/11!) tops the home page. Otherwise, it’s the home page on top, followed at some distance by “The body and its parts” (since it’s been out there for over 6 years, it has a gigantic cumulative hit total — over 18,000 as of today), “An eruption of bromanteaus” (from 1/13/16), and “Sexting with emoji” (from 3/19/17), though the order occasionally varies.
Into these regular patterns come occasional intrusions. A little while ago, an old posting on “Glass eels” (from 4/2/13) had a substantial revival, and in the list above, “Boobies” (from 3/29/15) and “An old joke” (either the one from 8/15/12 or the one from 4/4/11, both sexual) are blasts from the past. Otherwise, new postings might get a day or two of popularity before dropping out of sight. On any given day, a very large number of postings (of the over 7200 now available) get viewed, most only one or two times.
As for topic, postings with sexual content have the most enduring viewership, followed by those on cartoons or, more generally on humor (like “The pun within the pun”, from 11/24/17, above). However, postings heavy in mansex content are not particularly favored. Nor, unsurprisingly, are my postings heavy in technical linguistic content. Animal, plant, music, poetry, and movie and tv postings never seem to be strong favorites, nor are postings about my life or about Zwickys, but I’ll keep writing about those topics, as well as about underwear, rainbow objects, diners and the like, penguins, and mammoths. Whatever catches my fancy.
Where the views come from. Again, there’s a regularity. Almost always the US on top by a sizable margin, then usually the UK, and then, in some order, Canada, India, and Australia. After that, other countries come in and out. November 25th was a Germany and Japan day, but there are Brazil days, Finland days, South Africa days, Spain days, etc. — and, once, a spectacular Turkey day (the only day, I believe, that Turkey even made it into the top 10), with Turkey at the top, well above the United States. (Some sort of bot anomaly, I suppose.)
A geographic/cultural note. If you look at WordPress’s little world map, you can discern something of a large world region of geography and culture (comparable to Latin America, or Latin America + the Caribbean), taking in South Asia (with India as its center), southern China, Southeast Asia (both mainland and maritime), and the Antipodes (Australia and New Zealand), plus the adjacent island of New Guinea. A zone of mixed Indian, Chinese, and Anglo influence, where Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and Catholic elements combine and contend.
(More on region-talk for that part of the world to come in a separate posting.)
December 7, 2017 at 8:43 am |
Immediately after this posting, views of this blog shot up 50%, and several specific oddities emerged. For one day only, my Page on shirtless postings, which had never made it into the top ten, soared close to the top of views. And for three days now, South Korea, which had also never made it into the top ten, has claimed a place in the view statistics comparable to Canada.
Oh, and a lot of high-sex postings appeared in the top ten: “The black gangbang fantasy” and “Displaying your nipples”, in particular. Given the season, it’s no surprise that “Gay Santas” has been reliably popular recently.