2016 Top Ten Whatever Posts + Social Media Stats
Posted on December 28, 2016 Posted by John Scalzi 18 Comments
Time for my annual nerdery about the most visited posts here, and the state of my social media presence. Ready? Sure you are, that’s why you’re here! This and cat pictures.
First, here are the top ten posts on Whatever f0r 2016, ranked by visits. Posts with asterisks were originally posted in years other than 2016.
1. The Cinemax Theory of Racism
2. Trump, the GOP, and the Fall
3. Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is*
4. Thoughts and Prayers
5. You Never Know Just How You Look Through Other People’s Eyes*
6. Apologies: What, When and How*
7. Clinton and Sanders and the End of the Road
8. My Endorsement for President, 2016: Hillary Clinton
9. Being Poor*
10. 10 Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing*
This year’s top posts are half current and half from the archives, which is actually about normal around here — as I’ve noted before, Whatever is fairly unusual in terms of blogs in how many “evergreen” posts the site has. Given previous trends in this area, I wouldn’t be surprised if “The Cinemax Theory of Racism” becomes a similar evergreen; it’s the most visited post on the site since “Straight White Male,” and barring some event, Trump will be president for four years.
If you remove archived posts from the top ten, here are the five other pieces from 2016 that would have made the cut:
- Dear GOP: We Can’t Save You If You Won’t Save Yourself
- My Electoral Prediction, 2016
- Police and Me and Philando Castle
- A Few Thoughts Post-Brexit
- Trump, His Jokes, and You
It’s fair to say that the top posts of 2016, written in 2016, were about politics and guns. It was that kind of year, alas.
In terms of daily visits to the site proper, Whatever saw a bit of a drop this year, which doesn’t surprise me: I spent several months in a “semi-hiatus,” in which I was posting fewer daily posts than I have in previous years. So as of today, there were 5,164,500 visits to the site for 2016, down from 5.8 million last year. This averages about to about 14,266 visits a day. Nothing to complain about! But still down.
Interestingly, however, the number of unique visitors is up — the highest it’s been since 2013 — and the visits to individual posts are pretty much where they were over the last few years. This suggests to me three things. One, that “event” posts like “The Cinemax Theory of Racism” brought new readers to the site as they linked in from other places (a similar thing happened in 2012 with “Straight White Male”); Two, that post-for-post, visitorship to Whatever has been pretty stable for a while now; Three, if I want to get visit numbers up next year, I should, you know, post more entries on a daily basis.
(Will I? Maybe, maybe not. As it happens I have three books due next year (a topic for a separate post) and will be doing a lot of travel. I’d like to post more; I think in 2017 I’m likely to have plenty to say. But then there my actual paid writing schedule to consider. So: We’ll see.)
As with last year, most people coming to the site came here by three ways: Google, Facebook and Twitter, those three arranged in descending order of importance. This is the Internet as it exists now, folks. The one individually-owned site that sent the most people here (Daring Fireball) sent maybe 1.5% of the traffic Facebook did over the year. Which, actually, is pretty impressive if you think about relative sizes.
Aside from people physically visiting Whatever, people read the site by “following” on WordPress, which serves a copy of entries to a reading queue (basically like an RSS feed). Those aren’t counted as part of the site’s recorded daily visits. As of this second, Whatever has 26,567 followers, up almost 5,000 from last year. So that’s nice. Hello, WordPress followers! Thanks for reading. Added to that, the non-Wordpress areas of Scalzi.com (which include previous non-Wordpress versions of Whatever) racked up 1.16 million visits, a testament to old, old links on the Internet (which is why in point of fact I keep up those previous versions of the site). Update: In the comments, NeilN notes that Feedly also logs 12,000 people following Whatever through that RSS service.
So: In sum, Whatever seems to be doing just fine, and maybe I should post more entries in 2017.
Leaving Whatever, my largest presence online, as it has been for the last couple of years, is on Twitter. As of right this second I have 111,329 followers, up 17.8K from this day last year, and tweeted a frankly ridiculous 19,712 times as of right now (which is still off last year’s pace — man, what was I doing with my life last year?). Those tweets garnered 177.54 million impressions, up substantially from last year, with the following being my most popular tweet of 2016 in terms of impressions, with more than 780,000:
(Pro tip: If you want a tweet to be seen by a lot of people, get retweeted by JK Rowling.)
My public Facebook page is up for the year as well, from 14k likes to 18k, while both Google Plus and Ello have remained basically perfectly still in terms of number of followers, which given their basically dormant state at this point, is entirely not surprising.
So, in sum: Whatever down in visits but up in visitors and followers; Twitter up in followers and individual tweets got more impressions on average; Facebook followers up; everything else, meh.
On to 2017.
OK, I follow you on WordPress, and get you via Feedly. Does this count twice? Just a silly question
Neither is reported in my stats, so, no. Also I don’t know at this point how many people follow me via Feedly or other RSS feeds; WordPress stopped reporting that.
+1 Feedly/byline
+1 RSS :}
email subscription and since you publish the entire post, I only need to come here to comment. I imagine others might be doing the same so your readership is likely higher than your pagehits.
+1 RSS
Read the headline “2016 top ten posts” then skipped to the list, and had massive cognitive dissonance when I saw “lowest difficulty setting”. Man, this year was really, really long. Then read the text again, and eventually figured out my mistake. But wow.
I was thinking of the “cinemax theory” piece. somewhere in between then and now, someone I was talking with made the analogy of bringing cookies to a bake sale with peanuts in them and then some kid ends up in the hospital. You might not have meant to put the kid in the hospital, but you did put peanuts in those cookies and lack of bad intentions doesn’t get the kid out of the emergency room.
I visit (several times per week) by clicking the bookmark I added to Firefox on my PC (I don’t as yet use mobile devices of any kind, nor any so-called “Social” media). I’m not sure how (or if) that fits into your already-listed methods.
I have Whatever bookmarked, and drop by a couple times a day. That will drop off if the new job works out, since I’ll be in a scif.
I found your blog about 2 years ago. A few months in, I had it bookmarked. A few months after that, I started checking it every day. About a year in, I decided to add “Old Man’s War” to my massive “To Read” pile.
A few days ago, I finally got it for Christmas and devoured it all in one sitting.
Next week I’ll head to my local bookstore and get a copy of The Ghost Brigades.
Long story short, your blog was a real gateway drug for me regarding all things Scalzi…and I suspect I’m not the only addict out there :)
J.K. Rowling is a demon possessed slut!
(Oh, wait. This isn’t Twitter. Sorry to all involved!)
Get you every post in Gmail! My regular harbinger of Whatever is on your mind. My favorite stuff tends to be your personal ones. Your ode to your daughter was a thing of beauty.
Feedly reports 12,000 readers for Whatever.
NeilN: Cool, I’ll update the entry. That means roughly 38K readers who don’t hit the site (unless they come to comment).
I follow you on WordPress, but click on the link from my WordPress “reading” page to get to your individual journal (I do this with all the stuff I follow there – at least part of why I follow people on WordPress is because I like the individual journal styles and such, and their default reader doesn’t show that). I’ve no idea how/if that shows up in your stats.
The evergreens are so because they’re still good writing on topics of current interest (with mostly good discussions). I fear this awful year’s no. 1 will stay green for the same reasons. Thanks for your fine work!
Admit it! You’ve cloned yourself. No single person write all that!
I get your posts through the WordPress feed, but I usually click through and open the actual post in a separate tab. A bit compulsively, actually. I don’t know why. Realizing that this makes WP count the hits, I’m glad that I do.
I usually just enter the URL directly…
Ended up reading the discussion about “You Never Know Just How You Look Through Other People’s Eyes”. Even if at times frustrating and incredibly long, it was a really good, entertaining and educational discussion. Thanks for providing a space for such. There’s not too many such spaces on the Web these days.