It’s getting a lot harder to compile these yearly statistics columns; platforms like WordPress employ a staff of programmers who seem keen to justify their jobs by “improving” things that were just fine as they were, and though the WordPress gang isn’t nearly as bad as those over at Twitter, they nonetheless have made posting harder than it used to be and stat-gathering much harder. I at first thought I wasn’t going to be able to do the column this year, but then I figured out where the data had been moved to; let’s hope they don’t make it impossible to find by next January.
I received a total of 1,001,515 visitors in 2014, about 100,000 less than in the previous year; the average number of hits per day was 2743. My best month was August, with a total of 91,790 views (2961 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, 48,438 in all; it was followed by Reddit (9070 hits) and Facebook (6684). #4 was Pinterest with 2512, #5 ErosBlog with 2053, #6 Bustle with 1955, #7 Girl on the Net with 1781, #8 USA Sex Guide with 1685, #9 Google News with 1223, and #10 Reason with 1139. The top ten countries in which my readers live together account for about 84% of all of my traffic; #1 is the United States with 597,959 hits (59.7%); #2 the United Kingdom with 75,400 (7.5%); #3 Canada with 64,390 (6.4%); #4 Australia with 35,635 (3.56%); #5 Germany with 18,772 (1.87%); #6 India with 12,452 (1.24%); #7 France with 11,714 (1.17%); #8 Ireland with 10,861 (1.08%); #9 The Netherlands with 10,526 (1.05%); and #10 Japan with 10,359 (1.03%).
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 1280 hits; “maggie mcneill” (spelled several different ways) was second with 1086. Perennial favorite “soapland” (in many different forms) was third with a total of 907, and “P411” fourth with 421 hits. Various permutations of “anonymous blogging” came in fifth at 407, “rhinoceros” dropped to sixth with 393 hits, and “sex doll” was seventh with 340. Inquiries about genital sizes & shapes came in eighth with 336, references to “Veronica Franco” came in ninth with 268, and “Sonagachi” was tenth with 237. The numbers for all of these continue to drop, unfortunately, due to Google’s continuing prudification of its search parameters, which also curtailed my traffic dramatically.
My top ten posts for the year were as follows:
Name | Date | # of hits in 2015 |
A Visit to Soapland | October 21st, 2011 | 38,555 |
All Shapes and Sizes | September 8th, 2010 | 35,911 |
Black Men | September 18th, 2010 | 24,103 |
Advice for Clients | August 21st, 2010 | 22,415 |
A Whore in the Bedroom | September 9th, 2010 | 17,518 |
More Terminology | September 7th, 2011 | 17,445 |
Something in the Milk | January 28th, 2014 | 14,347 |
The Going Rate | October 9th, 2010 | 13,133 |
Honolulu Harlots | July 5th, 2011 | 8772 |
Ashley Madison | January 30th, 2011 | 8760 |
Dr. Brooke Magnanti’s “How To Blog Anonymously (and how not to)” also had considerable traffic (33,985 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 remained almost static since last year:
Name | Date | # of comments by 12/31/15 |
The Privilege Paradigm | August 22nd, 2013 | 230 |
That Is So Hot! | April 19th, 2011 | 202 |
Speaking in Prostitute | June 17th, 2011 | 193 |
Pendulum | April 9th, 2011 | 146 |
The Enlightenment Police | October 1st, 2011 | 145 |
TW3 #409 | March 1st, 2014 | 145 |
Universal Criminality | January 15th, 2012 | 141 |
Their Lips Are Moving | April 25th, 2011 | 133 |
Denunciation | September 2nd, 2013 | 126 |
Creeping Rot | April 18th, 2011 | 123 |
Posts just don’t get as many comments as they used to; I’m not sure if that’s because of Google’s censorship or the fact that I don’t do as many full columns anymore. But even though my readership seems to have leveled out, my Twitter following is growing and in the coming year, I think you’ll see me in lots more places in the media than before.
Excellent status report. By the way, what you said about WordPress and Twitter changing things for the sake of it summarizes why I left Newgrounds a over a year ago.
“I received a total of 1,001,515 visitors in 2014, about 100,000 less than in the previous year; ”
Did you mean 2015?
Googles censorship? I kinda missed that. Did you do a blog post on that?
In 2013 Google changed its search algorithms to severely downplay results from sites they deemed “adult”. My pagerank dropped from a 5 to a 4 almost overnight. Look at the past two “years in review” to see the difference in my search income.
Right. That is annoying indeed. Trouble with our digital infrastructure coming from the rather puritanical USA, i’m afraid. 🙁
I heard twitter is doing similar things nowadays, no longer just a communications medium, but softly downgrading some opinions by making them less accessible.
Thanks for the reply.
“improving things”:
This is a disease rampart in the IT industry. It is made worse by idiotic hiring policies that strongly favor people that are young, cheap and inexperienced.
One of the fundamental principles of good engineering is “if it is not broken, do NOT fix it” and another one is KISS (“keep it simple”). Keeping interfaces and data formats stable unless there is a very good reason to change things is exceptionally important in the IT field. It seems more and more programmers do not even know these fundamentals and the utter stupidity of regarding anything “new” as “better” adds to the problem. And of course the management-driven mania of requiring people that essentially do maintenance to show “productivity” also plays a role.
As one of the people that sometimes gets hired to clean up such messes, I really find this very unprofessional and very annoying.
That is a big problem indeed. Very visible in websites. Redesigning the look of a site is cool, and a fun project. Making sure all the old features (which the users really depend on) still work is not.
Nowdays every time a site gets redesigned I cringe. And worry about what features are now gone forever.