According to the data provided, the most-viewed post of 2024, with c 259,000 views, was this: which is a short and obscurely titled musing from 2015 that attracted no comments. Presumably the bots liked it for some unknowable bot-reason...
The other highest ranked posts are more plausible, being on socio-political (i.e. not religious/ philosophical) themes, and having attracted some comments - but the number of total views (i.e. for the whole blog, not any particular post) last year was 1,780,000.
This would average about 4,500 views per day - which seems too high to be real, although maybe a few people re-viewing a selection of the c 8,000 old posts might be able to reach that level (one or two views of an old post here, half a dozen views there, multiplied by a few hundred old posts viewed that day...?).
And people looking at old posts would be unlikely to comment, so I would not know about it.
I have no idea what the real numbers of views by human beings of the blog as a whole would be for each day but modal average day's blog post accumulate between 200-500 views - mostly within the first couple of days.
But the fact that the first of October last year is listed as the peak day, having 316,790 views (!) must surely be those bots at work again, somewhere in the backlog of old posts - rather than sudden massive enthusiasm for the post of that day.
8 comments:
My stats have become increasingly incoherent in the past few years, too, with sudden spikes occurring for no discernible reason and huge amounts of traffic from random foreign countries. I’ve concluded that the stats are now meaningless, and true levels of traffic unknowable.
You’d think there would be a strong incentive to find ways of accurately measuring traffic, for advertising purposes, but apparently not. Or at least if they have accurate statistics, they don’t share them with us bloggers.
My greatest number of page views last year by some distance came from Hong Kong and Singapore. In 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th position were USA, Canada, UK and Australia which makes some kind of sense. I assume the first two are entirely bots.
@William - "I assume the first two are entirely bots." That seems likely.
Back around 15 years ago, my blogs always had a significant majority of views from the USA compared with the UK - about fivefold more from the US (which is the differential of the population size); except for Albion Awakening which was around 50:50 US:UK, as might be expected.
So, unless the US dominates significantly in page views, it is probable that we are talking about "bots" (whatever they are! - I confess to near zero understanding of what "bots" actually means!)
Of course, it may be that I have a massive fanbase in Hong Kong but somehow I doubt it!
@WmJas - "if they have accurate statistics, they don’t share them with us bloggers."
That's it - I'm sure. Just as you discovered, they no longer deign to share all of their search results - but only a small selection of (at most) a few hundred of them.
https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2022/11/challenge-find-any-search-string-that.html
Once in a while, I go through your older posts using the search feature whenever I'm researching certain topics. A few weeks ago it was on the topic of "EBM." I don't comment on the posts and my research (in that case) was entirely for offline reasons.
It's impossible to say how many people do things like that, but it's probably mostly bots and the like.
@Derek - Yes, and that is (I presume) the reason why - over a span of 14+ years - the trend for total blog views is upwards; despite that each post has fewer views (and less impact) than in the past (especially since Google down-rated the blog on searches. I don't know whether this is personal, but it has happened more than once).
There is no doubt that blogs in the noughties and early teens of the century were more read and more influential than since social media proliferated.
I stopped collecting traffic analytics at NWI over a year ago because I found the data to be essentially useless.
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