2012-01-24

Web Traffic at Stationary Waves

One of the nice features of Blogger (and probably other blog applications out there) is the fact that it automatically generates traffic information by the day, week, month, etc. You don't get to do a deep dive into the traffic database, unfortunately, but Blogger produces sufficiently many metrics for me to track what types of viewers are reading the blog, where my web traffic comes from, and what people tend to read.

The results are full of interesting surprises. For example:
  • I get a surprising amount of web traffic from the People's Republic of China, despite the fact that Google IPs (where this blog resides, given that it is a Blogger blog) are blocked in that country. 
  • I get regular web traffic from Germany, Lithuania, India, and Bangladesh.
  • Most of my Ron Thal related web traffic comes from paises hispanohablantes
  • A large percentage of my heavy-traffic hours occurs during what are "off-hours" for me, i.e. between the hours of 2am and 7am.
But what surprises me most of all is the fact that - setting aside outliers - most of my readers seem to prefer my economics posts more than my fitness or philosophy posts. That is, if the number of "hits" are a good proxy for reader preference, people seem to be drawn most to my economics articles.

Music posts are a strong second-place.

The reason this surprises me is because when I talk to some of my more faithful readers, they voice a preference for the exercise stuff. Yet, after a few consecutive days of fitness posting, my traffic invariably dies down. It warms up again once I publish something about politics or economics.

What are your own personal favorite SW topics? Leave a comment and let me know what you like best.

1 comment:

  1. I have expressed a lot of interest to you personally in your fitness posts, but I also prefer the economic posts. Probably because the fitness posts are pretty much information. That is, you write, I read and for the most part concur. Where I don't concur, I simply don't and that's the end of it. In the eco-political posts I sometimes concur and where I don't there is a fair amount of work to do on my part to determine where you or I went wrong or why the 'solution set' is greater than 1. :) That, for me, is a lot of fun. Thanks for writing such a great blog.

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