Anniversaries are one of those times at which we’re inspired to look back at the past to see where we’ve been; it’s a bit like sitting on top of a mountain and surveying the route one took to get there. – “Second Anniversary”
Well it’s that time once again! Every January I share my blog’s statistics for the preceding year; this is made possible by the amazing wealth of data which WordPress makes available to bloggers in real time. As I explained in my review column for 2011,
…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…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)…
Since February 25th, 2012 the visitors from each country have also been tracked, so this is the first year I’ve had complete information on this broken down by country on my normal statistics page. Alas, it appears WordPress has discontinued its annual year-end report, but the only information it featured which isn’t available on demand is the total number of comments by the top commenters; perhaps they’ll add that to the statistics page soon.
I received a total of 1,018,507 visitors in 2013; the average number of hits per day was 2790, but it was higher from August onward. My best month was October, with a total of 108,868 views (3512 per day) and my best day was October 6th, with a total of 9253 views in a single day (thanks to someone featuring a link to “Honolulu Harlots” on Reddit). That site gave me the third-greatest number of referrals for the year, 8243 in all; it was only exceeded by Twitter (38,377 hits) and Facebook (8440). #4 was Popehat with 5648, #5 ErosBlog with 3636, #6 Pinterest with 1553, #7 The Guardian (“Why Comic Relief’s Prostitution Claims Put Me Off Donating” by Brooke Magnanti) with 1545, #8 Google Reader with 1380, #9 Judgy Bitch with 1327, and #10 A Voice for Men with 1244. The top ten countries in which my readers live together account for over 85% of all of my traffic; #1 is the United States with 602,407 hits (59%); #2 the United Kingdom with 88,912 (8.7%); #3 Canada with 58,206 (5.7%); #4 Australia with 41,485 (4.1%); #5 Germany with 18,642 (1.8%); #6 Singapore with 13,671 (1.34%); #7 India with 13,312 (1.31%); #8 France with 13,149 (1.29%); #9 The Netherlands with 11,253 (1.1%); and #10 Japan with 10,217 (1.0%).
The most common search which discovered this blog was various versions of “ashley madison” (many expecting “free” credits), a total of over 6978 hits; second place was held by “soapland” in many different forms for a total of over 6931. Permutations of “the honest courtesan” came third with over 6624 hits. Last year’s leader, “rhinoceros”, dropped to fourth with over 5841 hits; the many different ways to say “penis shapes” came next (over 3776 total). “Caroline otero” or “la belle otero” was sixth with about 2121, “maggie mcneill” (spelled several different ways) was seventh with over 1563, then “veronica franco” with 1035. Ninth place was “courtesan” with 541, and finally “valeria messalina” with 427. You may have noticed that picture searches no longer bring as many visitors as they used to; this is probably due to Google image search’s December 2012 change, which buries sites it classifies as “adult”.
My top ten posts for the year were as follows:
| Name | Date | # of hits in 2013 |
| A Visit to Soapland | October 21st, 2011 | 46,293 |
| All Shapes and Sizes | September 8th, 2010 | 42,970 |
| Ashley Madison | January 30th, 2011 | 37,756 |
| Rhinoceros | January 21st, 2012 | 15,940 |
| Honolulu Harlots | July 5th, 2011 | 12,677 |
| Black Men | September 18th, 2010 | 11,266 |
| A Whore in the Bedroom | September 9th, 2010 | 11,261 |
| More Terminology | September 7th, 2011 | 6,920 |
| The Privilege Paradigm | August 22nd, 2013 | 6,123 |
| La Belle Otero | March 30th, 2012 | 6,023 |
The top post by comment has changed somewhat since last year:
| Name | Date | # of comments by 12/31/13 |
| The Privilege Paradigm | August 22nd, 2013 | 229 |
| That Is So Hot! | April 19th, 2011 | 196 |
| Speaking in Prostitute | June 17th, 2011 | 171 |
| The Enlightenment Police | October 1st, 2011 | 145 |
| Universal Criminality | January 15th, 2012 | 140 |
| Pendulum | April 9th, 2011 | 134 |
| Their Lips Are Moving | April 25th, 2011 | 133 |
| Denunciation | September 2nd, 2013 | 124 |
| Creeping Rot | April 18th, 2011 | 123 |
| Public Service Announcement | June 12th, 2011 | 122 |
Unfortunately, I’m afraid that because WordPress has changed the way top commenters are calculated, it’s prohibitively difficult for me to get meaningful numbers on them. Other than that, comparison with my reports for 2011 and 2012 will demonstrate just how much I’ve grown in both size and reach. And while it makes me feel good to know that I’m entertaining and educating so many people, what’s even better is knowing that the truth about sex workers and those who want to crush us is being spread that much more. 
