2014 in Review

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 6^th, 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:

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:

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.