Whatever Stats 2010: The Nerdination

Posted on January 2, 2011    Posted by John Scalzi      5 Comments

Because I know you want to know these things, and keeping in mind the standard caveats regarding the accuracy of the WordPress stats suite:

1. The WordPress stats suite suggests that viewership in 2010 was up from 2009, with 5.13 million views recorded by the stats suite, up from 4.46 million views the year before. The month with the highest viewership in 2010 was February, when the Amazon thing happened; the lowest viewership was in August, when I was on hiatus (although the site was still very well trafficked, thanks to the guest bloggers).

Naturally I’m very pleased that the viewership of the site continues to grow; it’s nice to know new people are still dropping by. Hello, newer people. I love you.

2. The top 10 posts of the year — by visits to Whatever directly — are, in popular order:

1. Things I Don’t Have to Think About Today
2. All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend
3. Wil Wheaton/John Scalzi Fan Fiction Contest to Benefit the Lupus Alliance of America
4. Being Poor
5. Kodi, 1997 – 2010
6. What I Think About Atlas Shrugged
7. A Quick Note On eBook Pricing and Amazon Hijinx
8. An Interview With the Nativity Innkeeper
9. 10 Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing
10. How to Make a Schadenfreude Pie

Folks who know the site at all will observe that three of the top ten posts are posts from the archives (Being Poor, Teenage Writers, Schadenfreude Pie), and among the top twenty posts, another four are archive posts, including (of course) the one featuring bacon cat. It’s nice to have a “greatest hits” in this respect, and to be blunt I’m glad “Being Poor” is a bigger “hit” than bacon cat, on a year to year basis.

3. That said, I’ll note that if one includes RSS readership, the single most viewed Whatever post of the year, by far, was “Nativity Innkeeper,” which tracked 175,000 total views in 2010, more than doubling the 80,000 total views for “Things I Don’t Have to Think About Today,” even though it was available for substantially less time. Although off-site viewing has happened for as long as their have been RSS feeds available, in 2010 it appears to be taking on a life of its own. I’m going to have to figure out what it means, but at the same time I don’t really see it changing the way I do things here on the site.

4. Indeed, at this point, I have no major plans to change anything about what I do with the site, aside from a minor point of scheduling, which I will detail separately. I like it the way it is and for my purposes (self-entertainment, heat sink, place to socialize online, outlet for things I don’t write for the market) it does what it does pretty well. So I’ll just keep at it. Thanks for dropping by to see what I’m up to.