Statistics for the fifth year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News

I told my readers to stay tuned for a statistics entry about the blogging year just ended, first in Nowruz Mubarak (Happy Persian New Year) and Happy Birthday to the blog and again in A belated Earth Hour 2016.  It's time to follow through and complete the cycle.

Between March 21, 2015, and March 20, 2016, I posted 435 entries, which earned 176,458 page views and 672 comments from my readers and me.  These are out of totals of 2724 entries, 595,621 page views, and 1309 during the first five years of the blog. For comparison, I present the statistics from the previous four years.

During the fourth year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News, from March 21, 2014 to March 20, 2015, I posted 528 entries, the readers and I posted 229 comments, and the blog received 145,875 page views for a total of 2289 posts, 637 comments, and 419,163 page views over the entire first four years of the blog.*  For comparison, the third year of this blog saw 785 entries, 304 comments, and 127,945 page views, the second year I posted 493 entries, readers and I posted 129 comments, and the blog received 97,535 page views, and the first full year I made 483 posts, readers and I posted 204 comments, and the blog received 47,808 page views.
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*I am recording these stats from Midnight EDT to Midnight EDT on March 21 of successive years.  It would be easier to record using Midnight GMT, as that is the default time zone of the stats recorder, but I want to count full days here, not London.

Follow over the jump for my analysis of the fifth year's statistics compared to the fourth year's.

As was my goal during the fourth year of the blog, my objective during the fifth year was to increase page views per post while still increasing my overall readership.  I succeeded spectacularly.  Page views increased by 20.97% (30,853) last year over the year before, larger than the previous year's 14.0%.  Meanwhile, I posted 93 fewer entries, a decrease of 17.61%.  The result was an increase of page views per entry posted during the year from 276.28 during 2014-2015 to 405.65 during 2015-2016, an increase of 46.83%.  That's not as big a relative jump as the blog experienced the year before, 69.32%, but I'm still growing my readership without feeling that I'm working too hard,  I'm still at least a couple of years away from reaching the point of diminishing returns again.

Of course, if total page views are up, so are the page views per month.  Those also increased 20.97% from the previous year from 12,156.25 to 14,704.83.  Since the monthly average the year before was 10,662.08 and the year before that was 8127.92, it looks like I'm stepping up my monthly average by between 2000 and 2500 each year.  So I'll shoot for a monthly average between 16,500 and 17,500 for the coming year, although I could be satisfied if I just exceed 15,000.  I've found it's helpful to set goals for myself.

One statistic that pleasantly surprised me was the number of comments.  More than half the comments this blog received in its history were posted last year, 672 out of 1309.  Compared to last year's 229, that's an increase of 193.45%!  Sliced other ways, that translates to 1.54 comments per entry and 56.0 comments per month.  In contrast, the year before saw 0.43 comments per entry and 19.08 per month.  Even comments per page view rose from 0.00157 to 0.0038, an increase of 142.04%.  I credit the jumps in all the commenting statistics to getting a new crop of blogging colleagues who respond to my entries, in particular Paul W. of You Might Notice A Trend.  He's done more than his share to raise the level of participation among my readers.  Thank you, Paul!

Paul has also linked to my blog (and I to his), helping to drive readership.  That added to all of the tactics I used last year.

I credit the improvements in page views and comments per entry while posting less to more effective promotion.  In addition to continuing my promotion of individual entries at Kunstler's blog, I stepped up promotion at Greer's.  I've also shared a few relevant entries at the Coffee Party USA Facebook page.  I plan on doing that at least once a month from here on out.  In addition, I started a Facebook page for this blog last January and I've been learning how to use it to get people to read entries from the back catalog.  In addition, people are linking to my blog from theirs, in particular Infidel753, who has included links to three of my entries in his weekly linkspams over the past month.  Not all the effective promotion has been my doing, which I appreciate.  After all, word of mouth (or its online equivalent) is the best form of advertising.

I'm still using all of these this past year, especially sharing links at the Coffee Party Facebook page.  That's been very effective, as I'll explain later.

Finally, it's time to review the top nine foreign countries providing readers to my blog.  Russia remains the top international source of page views with 28,960 total.  Germany has jumped from sixth up to third at 19,646.  The U.K. has slid to fourth with 18,866.  France and Canada also each dropped a place to fifth and sixth with 18,223 and 17,782 respectively.  Ukraine has moved ahead of China at 13,260 and 12,921, respectively.  Finally, Australia and Turkey have languished in ninth and tenth with Oz at 4,026 page views and Turkey essentially the same page views as a year ago, 1446.  Looks like I didn't waste the Germany label after all!

Stay tuned for a entry about the top post of last year.  Here's a hint.


Previous entries in this series.

Nowruz Mubarak (Happy Persian New Year) and Happy Birthday to the blog

Statistics entries from previous years.

Statistics for the fourth year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News
Statistics for the third year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News
Second Year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News: Statistics
The first year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News: Part 1 of several