2011 in Review

London Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. This blog was viewed about 400,000 times in 2011.  If it were competing at London Olympic Stadium, it would take about 5 sold-out events for that many people to see it.  –  WordPress.com presents The Honest Courtesan 2011 in blogging

One of the things I really, really like about WordPress is that it provides lots of statistics; the statistics page displays a bar graph of page views (with tabs to view it in days, weeks or months); a running total of both daily and all-time views (and summary tables breaking it down by weeks, months and years) for the blog as a whole and breaking it down by post and page; numbers and links of all sites and searches which bring visitors to the blog; and the number of clicks on links in my blog (with all figures broken down by day, week, month, quarter, year and all time).  And on top of that, I can see subscribers, comments and even spam totals.  Then, WordPress provides an annual year-end report I’ve decided to share with you; today I want to look at some “top ten” numbers.  Some of the exact figures which don’t appear as such in the official report are only approximate though stated as if exact, because they are displayed for the previous year from the date they are observed; in other words, since I’m writing this on January 4^th the figures for January 1^st-3^rd of last year have been replaced by those from January 1^st-3^rd of this year.  I think my readers will forgive me for the minor inaccuracy thus produced.

I received a total of 404,824 visitors in 2011 (and that is an exact figure); the average number of hits per day was 1109.  My best month was April, with a total of 47,224 views (1574 per day) and my best day was January 31^st, with a total of 3486 views in a single day (thanks to Radley Balko’s featuring a link to “Numerology” on The Agitator).  That site gave me the second-greatest number of referrals for the year, 2815 in all; it was exceeded only by Psychology Today (specifically, Satoshi Kanazawa’s article “Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes?”), from which I received 3574 hits in all.  #3 was the WordPress homepage with 2678, #4 Google Reader with 2193, #5 Metafilter with 1858, #6 Facebook with 1365, #7 The Dallas Observer (specifically Pete Kotz’s article “The Super Bowl Prostitute Myth”) with 1119, #8 ECCIE with 868, #9 Kelly Michaels’ Satisfy the Crave with 867 and #10 EconJeff with 668.  I’d also like to acknowledge #11-20, each of whom referred 326-627 hits: Twitter, Canada Adult Fun, USA Sex Guide, The Spearhead, Sina More’s blog, Jaded Haven,  The Player, TER, A Voice for Men and Bound, Not Gagged.  On the other hand, the most often-clicked links on my blog in 2011 were Brandy’s Bedroom with 941 clicks, Vixen for Hire with 643, Bound, Not Gagged with 609, Feminisn’t with 589, Sex Hysteria! with 508, Sincerely, Kelly James with 506, The Naked Anthropologist with 490, After Hours with 470, Stuff Sex Workers Eat with 461 and Harlot’s Parlour with 448.

Google accounted for roughly 95% of all of my search engine hits last year, and the most common search was for some version of “the honest courtesan” (roughly 9013 hits).  Some permutation of “texas counties” or “texas county map” brought in roughly 5628 hits, “veronica franco” brought 3591, “maggie mcneill” and variations 3273, “pompeii” 2608, “mira sorvino” 2271, various “ashley madison” combinations 1727, “sofa bed” 1374, “wife swapping” and variations 1214 and “plaçage” 793 (see “Top Ten” from last August for an explanation of the strange terms).  A few honorable mentions:  “broken condom”, “madame de pompadour”, “hells angels”, “prostitute”, “grimoire”, “mecca”, “phryne”, “mardi gras tits”, “storyville” and “yellow rose of texas”.

Due to image searches (as explained in “Top Ten”) my top ten posts were as follows:

Name                                                      Date                         # of hits in 2011
Coming and Going                                  February 10^th, 2011                6,353
Courtesan Denial                                    December 4^th, 2010                4,632
Meretrices and Prostibulae                     November 3^rd, 2010                4,396
Numerology                                            January 24^th, 2011                  3,741
Ashley Madison                                      January 30^th, 2011                  3,569
Who Did Your Tits?                                 October 1^st, 2010                    3,328
Acting and Activism                                 January 8^th, 2011                   2,860
Black Men                                               September 18^th, 2010             2,741
Wife Swapping                                       November 20^th, 2010              2,547
Plaçage                                                   November 22^nd, 2010             2,409

And here’s the corrected list:

Name                                                      Date                         # of hits in 2011
Numerology                                            January 24^th, 2011                  3,741
Ashley Madison                                       January 30^th, 2011                  3,569
Black Men                                               September 18^th, 2010              2,741
Wife Swapping                                       November 20^th, 2010               2,547
Plaçage                                                   November 22^nd, 2010              2,409
All Shapes and Sizes                               September 8^th, 2010               2,012
A Whore in the Bedroom                         September 9^th, 2010               1,904
Japanese Prostitution                             October 21^st, 2010                  1,852
International Sex Workers’ Rights Day   March 3^rd, 2011                       1,831
Handy Figures                                         June 11^th, 2011                      1,703

The top post by comment hasn’t changed much since August:

Name                                            Date                     # of comments by 12/31/11
That Is So Hot!                             April 19^th, 2011                       195
Speaking in Prostitute                  June 17^th, 2011                       171
The Enlightenment Police             October 1^st, 2011                    144
Their Lips Are Moving                   April 25^th, 2011                        132
Pendulum                                     April 9^th, 2011                          131
Creeping Rot                                April 18^th, 2011                        123
Public Service Announcement       June 12^th, 2011                       120
Savaging                                      March 27^th, 2011                     115
Neither Cold Nor Hot                    April 6^th, 2011                          114
Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic     December 4^th, 2011                 104

…and the nine top commenters (after myself) were Sailor Barsoom with 1302, Laura with 730, Asehpe with 301, Gorbachev with 280, Krulac with 277, Comixchik with 206, Marla with 197, C Andrew with 189 and Aspasia with 101.

Probably the most interesting report to me is the one on where my visitors live, which appears only in the year-end report; I’d really like to see WordPress include it with the other daily data.  It doesn’t give exact numbers and the fractions were calculated on a continent-by-continent basis rather than worldwide, with proportions represented by graphics on a map.  Just eyeballing it, I’d say about 34% of my readers are in North America, 25% in Europe, 17% in Oceania, 12% in Asia, 8% in Africa and 4% in South America.

North America:  93.5% United States, 6.2% Canada and 0.1% Mexico
Europe:  39.7% United Kingdom, 15.2% Germany, 4.3% Norway, 4.1% Ireland and 3.9% Greece
Oceania:  92.4% Australia, 7.4% New Zealand
Asia:  25.5% Singapore, 12.6% India, 8.2% Malaysia, 7.5% The Philippines and 6.5% South Korea
Africa:  45.1% South Africa, 15.2% Nigeria, 13.8% Kenya, 6.7% Egypt and 4.0% Ghana
South America:  47.0% Brazil, 30.7% Colombia, 10.1% Argentina, 4.6% Chile and 3.0% Peru

I’m really pleased by these numbers, especially considering that only about a third of my readers are in my own country; most of the thanks for that go to my readers, who enthusiastically spread links to my posts all over the internet.  You’re helping me to speak out against all the lies, misinformation and tyranny, and thereby hastening the day when prohibitionist propaganda is seen by the average reasonable person with the same skepticism he might view any other outlandish bigotry.

One Year Ago Today

“What’s the Buzz” cites several articles about the “invisible majority” of sex workers, those who pretty much look and act like anybody else you might meet in public.