Saturday, March 23, 2019

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


As I promised first in Happy Birthday to the blog and Nowruz Mubarak (Happy Persian New Year)! and again in CNN's 'Dirty Water: Danger from the Tap' on World Water Day, it's time for me to report on the statistics for the eighth year of this blog.

Blogger recorded that this blog had a lifetime total of 2,168,149 page views and 3853 posts at 11:59 PM EDT March 20, 2019.  In addition, I counted 361 comments since March 21, 2018.  The equivalent numbers from the seventh year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News were 3465 entries, 1,630,513 page views, and 2,391 comments during the first six years of the blog.  The result was that the blog earned 537,636 page views while I posted 388 entries during 365 days.  Those are fewer page views and comments for more posts than during the seventh year of blogging here, 682,128 page views and 488 comments from my readers and me on 364 entries.  That's a first, and not a good one, either.  Follow over the jump for my analysis of what went "wrong."

For the past five years, my goal has been to increase page views per post while still increasing my overall readership.  None of that happened last year.  For the first time in five years, the number of page views per post decreased from to 1386.66, down from 1873.98, a decrease of 487.32 or 26.0%.  Even more distressingly, my total readership declined from year to year for the first time in the history of the blog, down 144,492 page views, a decrease of 22.8%.  In contrast to last year's declaration that "I'm still growing my readership without feeling that I'm working too hard," I am not even growing my readership at all!

If it's any consolation, this blog's numbers are still above where they were during its sixth year, when I posted 377 entries that earned 352,764 page views for an average of 935.71 page views per entry.  Just the same, instead of being a year away from reaching the point of diminishing returns, I hit it during the last week of October 2018.

I also missed my monthly goals.  Last year, the blog earned 56,844.00 page views per month and I was hoping for 60,000 page views.  Instead, the blog averaged 44,803 page views per month.  That's not bad, as it was both higher than the 31,000 to 35,000 page views per month that was my goal for the seventh year, but still down 22.8% from the seventh year.  I told my readers to wish me luck a year ago, but fortune and Facebook failed me.

Jast as I credited Facebook for my success last year, I am blaming it for my disappointment.  Until the last week of October, Facebook shares at the Join the Coffee Party Movement Facebook page (Coffee Party USA's main page on Facebook) were bringing in thousands of page views per share.  Starting that last week, traffic from Facebook collapsed.  Those shares brought in hundreds of readers instead of thousands.  It's not just me.  Slate noticed that the handwriting was on the wall last June, reporting that traffic from Facebook "plummeted a staggering 87 percent, from a January 2017 peak of 28 million to less than 4 million in May 2018. It’s down more than 55 percent in 2018 alone."  The loss of traffic actually first hit me in March 2018, but it recovered within a few weeks.  I was able to counteract the decrease by writing more of my entries for the Coffee Party audience on Facebook and posting more of them to Facebook, which lasted until the next-to-last week of October, at which point traffic from Facebook slowed to a trickle again and remained low.  Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to exceed 30,000 page views per month since November 2018 and only one entry has earned more than 2,000 page views in the past five months.  That won't stop me from continuing to write posts with a Coffee Party/Facebook audience in mind; I will just expect less from doing so.

On the other hand, Infidel753 has continued to link to my blog from his, keeping up a steady flow of visitors.  Thank you, Infidel, I'm glad to have online friends like you.

I've also resumed posting links at Kunstler's blog.  While I'm still disenchanted with him and most of his commenters, they can still be a useful source of readers and inspiration for posts of my own; I managed to get four entries about the Oscars from a series of comments I left there last month.  The same is true of Greer's blog, although that is not as reliable as Kunstler's.  The timing of his posts and their subject matter still don't lend themselves as much to me commenting there as either his old blog or Kunstler's.

As for other online sources, while I've been tweeting out links to my posts all along, I've been using Twitter more intensely by retweeting the Coffee Party USA account (posts shared on the Join the Coffee Party Movement Facebook page are automatically tweeted by Hootsuite) and tweeting out the links for the top entries of each month during the next month.  I've also been including links to relevant posts in replies to tweets by others.  I might be doing more of both in the coming year.

Meanwhile, one platform that has been good for getting readers to my blog is going away.  Google has been phasing out Google+ this year and will shut it down completely on April 2nd.  That site and the groups on it were good for a few hundred page views a week, which will be missed.  To replace Google+, I created an account on MeWe.com, but that will likely take a few years to have the reach that Google+ had and hasn't paid off at all yet; I don't recall seeing any traffic from MeWe so far.  At least Pinterest is sending readers my blog's way, something I expect to continue.

One platform that has eluded me is Reddit.  I tried to make an account there and failed.  That may not be all that bad.  Given the kind of reputation Reddit has, I might be better off as a person not frequenting that site.

Speaking of being better off, I have seen very little bot traffic over the past year.  I'd rather have real people reading my blog.  Besides, I don't know who the bots are working for, something that always made me feel apprehensive about them.

Because of all of the above, I am scaling down my monthly page view goal to 25,000, which means I expect 300,000 total page views for the ninth year of the blog.  That will drop next year's page views below the 352,764 page views for the sixth year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News, but still well above the 176,458 page views for the fifth year.

Comments continued to decline, decreasing from 488 comments last year, 528 if the ones sent directly to the spam folder are included, to 361.  That's a drop of 127 comments, 167 if the spam comments were included, or 26.02% or 24.03%.  Either is a bigger percentage drop than last year's 108 comments or 18.12%.  Comments per month and comments per post also fell, the former from 40.67 to 30.33 or 26.18% and the latter from 1.34 to 0.93 or 30.60%.  Again, while I'm not pleased, I'm still not upset, as comments are the one statistic I have the least control over.  The bright spot was that comments per page view actually went up from 0.0005 to 0.0007.  That's what happens when there are more real people and fewer bots reading my posts.  Speaking of real people, thanks to Infidel 753, Kevin Robbins, Diana Frey, Nebris, and Allan S. for being regular and repeat commenters here.  You make up for all the bots and spammers.


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 64,415 total, up from last year's 54,221. The rest of the top six maintained their positions with Canada in third with 46,767 page views, up from 34,163 last year, Germany holding fourth place at 40,547, up from 32,909, with the U.K. close behind Germany in fifth with 39,076, an increase from 32,184.  France remained in sixth with 34,987, rising from 28,921 and Ukraine held on in seventh with 20,499 page views, up from 14,868 a year ago.  Italy jumped over China and Australia to reach in eighth place with 15,523 page views, a huge jump over last year's 4,241.  Wow!  That's a near quadrupling of lifetime page views in one year from one country!  Thanks to my Italian readers for doing their part to keep my page views up!  Maybe I should write more about Italy on this blog in return.  China fell to ninth as page views from the Middle Kingdom actually decreased from 13,527 to 13,510.  I've seen that before, which means that these are being counted by the default counter, not the raw counter, and that it is doing what it does for posts, revising the totals as it eliminates duplicates.  At least the page view count is still above that for the sixth year of this blog, 13,237,  Finally, Australia fell from ninth to tenth while still increasing page views from last year's 7,615 to 10,228.  At this rate, Australia will pass China next year while I wouldn't be surprised to see Italy pass Ukraine.

That's it for this year's statistics post.  I'll get to the top post of last year, but only after I write about the Marche du Nain Rouge.  Stay tuned!

Previous posts in this series

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

Statistics entries from previous years.

4 comments:

  1. Hey, as long as you keep writing interesting posts, I'll keep linking to them -- though not very consistently, I admit, since my reading tends to fluctuate all over the place for various reasons. But I usually catch up in the end.

    That's too bad if you're relying on Facebook for a lot of your page views. Facebook is taking something of a hit thanks to growing concerns about privacy and data collecting, and it's probably going to continue. I get occasional links from Facebook, but I can never tell what page they're coming from or why. Still, it sounds like you've got other arenas on tap.

    Reddit can bring in a lot of readers. One of my posts was once linked by someone there and it got a huge number of views. As you say, though, they may not be the kind of people you want.

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    1. Thank you. I'm looking forward to your linking to my interesting posts in the future.

      Speaking of which, are you still posting at Crooks & Liars? I haven't seen any traffic from there in about a year.

      As for Facebook, that's been a trend for a year or so. In retrospect, I'm amazed I was able to fight it for so long.

      Yeah, I'm probably better off without the Redditors, even if I miss the readers.

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  2. Yes, I'm still doing the blog round-ups at Crooks and Liars. For example, one of your posts was in this one and two previous ones this year.

    For me, at least on the regular Blogger stat counter, Crooks and Liars doesn't show up in the "traffic sources" list for some reason. I still see the surge in number of page views when I get linked from there, but their site name doesn't actually show on the list. I don't know why.

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    1. Thank you for that link, as I wouldn't have known if you hadn't told me. I'm glad to see you still blogging there. Keep up the good work!

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