I think I can safely declare this blog a success. – “Fourth Anniversary”
Due to the decreasing number of daily slots available for general posts, this feature is appearing a little later than usual this year; in fact, I didn’t even get to write it until two days after the date on which it published last year. But here it is, better late than never; newer readers who haven’t seen one before may be interested in the description of how the statistics are derived from last year’s review column.
I received a total of 1,110,606 visitors in 2014, about 100,000 more than in the previous year; the average number of hits per day was 3043. My best month was January, with a total of 106,741 views (3443 per day); as you can see the performance is very consistent, with the high not all that far above the average. Indeed, the record for best single day is still held by October 6th, 2013 (9253 views). As it did last year, Twitter gave me the greatest number of referrals, 45,120 in all; it was followed by Reddit (8877 hits) and Facebook (7131). #4 was Popehat with 3438, #5 ErosBlog with 3339, #6 Girl on the Net with 2632, #7 Reason with 2011, #8 Heartiste with 1955, #9 ECCIE with 1900, and #10 USA Sex Guide with 1662. The top ten countries in which my readers live together account for about 85% of all of my traffic; #1 is the United States with 672,268 hits (60.5%); #2 the United Kingdom with 86,739 (7.8%); #3 Canada with 73,509 (6.6%); #4 Australia with 38,239 (3.4%); #5 Germany with 18,300 (1.65%); #6 The Netherlands with 14,106 (1.27%); #7 India with 13,831 (1.25%); #8 Japan with 13,558 (1.22%); #9 Singapore with 10,823 (0.98%); and #10 France with 10,624 (0.96%).
In a strong sign of my increasing popularity, the most common search which discovered this blog last year was “the honest courtesan” (in various permutations) with 1958 hits; “maggie mcneill” (spelled several different ways) was third with 1710. Perennial favorite “soapland” (in many different forms) was second with a total of 1858, and “rhinoceros” remained at fourth with 1402 hits. Various versions of “ashley madison” (many expecting “free” credits) came in fifth with 971 hits; the many different ways to say “penis shapes” came sixth (about 835 total). “P411” was seventh with about 385, then “escort terms” (various forms) with 358. Ninth place was “anonymous blogging” with 356, and finally many different forms of “vulva shapes” with 337. The numbers for all of these are dramatically lower than last years’; I’m sure this is due to Google’s continuing prudification of its search parameters, which also curtailed my traffic growth dramatically and reduced my page rank from a 5 to a 4.
My top ten posts for the year were as follows:
Name | Date | # of hits in 2014 |
A Visit to Soapland | October 21st, 2011 | 52,920 |
All Shapes and Sizes | September 8th, 2010 | 47,454 |
Ashley Madison | January 30th, 2011 | 23,593 |
A Whore in the Bedroom | September 9th, 2010 | 20,403 |
More Terminology | September 7th, 2011 | 17,816 |
Black Men | September 18th, 2010 | 16,315 |
Something in the Milk | January 28th, 2014 | 14,944 |
Advice for Clients | August 21st, 2010 | 12,995 |
The Going Rate | October 9th, 2010 | 10,301 |
Rhinoceros | January 21st, 2012 | 9342 |
Dr. Brooke Magnanti’s “How To Blog Anonymously (and how not to)” also had considerable traffic (16,423 hits in all); the reason it doesn’t appear in the table above is that it’s a static page rather than a post (I exclude my “Introduction” page for the same reason). The top post by comment has changed somewhat since last year:
Name | Date | # of comments by 12/31/14 |
The Privilege Paradigm | August 22nd, 2013 | 230 |
That Is So Hot! | April 19th, 2011 | 202 |
Speaking in Prostitute | June 17th, 2011 | 191 |
Pendulum | April 9th, 2011 | 146 |
The Enlightenment Police | October 1st, 2011 | 145 |
TW3 #409 | March 1st, 2014 | 144 |
Universal Criminality | January 15th, 2012 | 140 |
Their Lips Are Moving | April 25th, 2011 | 133 |
Denunciation | September 2nd, 2013 | 126 |
Creeping Rot | April 18th, 2011 | 123 |
Even with Google’s attempts to silence the voice of anyone who dares to write about sex, comparison with my reports for 2012 and 2013 will demonstrate just how much I’ve grown in both size and reach. And in the coming year, I plan to use every means at my disposal to increase that even more.
Congratulations. Your success is well deserved.
I think you may find that it is not google being prude, but the removal of referal information and keywords when the the search is being performed in google with an encrypted connection. First off most web browsers will not send the URL of the originating website where the originating website uses https and the target website uses http.
I also read somewhere that google also stripped out the keywords when the search was using https, so that even if the browser did pass the source URL across, the keywords search would be missing. I have noticed the keyword stats are virtually useless now in all searches, adult or not. Ok they may be statistically relevant as a sample.
As an aside I turned all my advertising sites into https, because there was a hint that google would give them a little boost in search. I soon removed this because people looking at their google analytics suddenly did not see any traffic from my sites. The webbrowser was removing the referal information required by the analyics products to work out where the links were coming from. This caused me some issues explaining to customers who were paying good money to advertise. I had to quickly remove https while I think of a way around this.
So it’s a byproduct of more people turning to secure sites & encrypted connections?
I am afraid so. Google is making it increasing SSL only for its search, and has definitely gone about removing the search strings so that analytics programs cannot find the keyword. Privacy.
Here is an article from 2011
http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/making-search-more-secure-accessing.html
How will this change impact Google Analytics users?
When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google “organic” search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site. Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google “cpc”.
Congratulations on another great year!
I wish you continuing success, I came on board lately, but I appreciate your blog very much and hope you are around for a long time.
Congratulations from me too!