2015 in Review

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 6^th, 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:

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:

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.