Celebrating nine years of interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms. As before, a look at the annual delivery of stats from WordPress is instructive.
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 970,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 42 days for that many people to see it.
The busiest day of the year was August 30th with 4,215 views. The most popular post that day was Index, fist or manicule?
Most posts here hit between 2,500 to 3,000 visits a day although the annual total is down on last year. I have Google stats indexing this site but I can never be bothered logging in to see how they compare. WordPress has the advantage of delivering stats to your blogging dashboard.
These are the posts that got the most views in 2014.
1 The art of NoBeast June 2007
2 The art of Thomas Eakins, 1844–1916 March 2006
3 The art of Takato Yamamoto June 2007
4 Gekko Hayashi revisited December 2012
5 The art of Oliver Frey July 2009
The gay art posts always beat everything else, and NoBeast is the most popular post for another year. Russia’s current crop of authoritarian goons may regard gay sex as horribly un-Russian but NoBeast gets consistently heavy traffic from VK, the Russian social network.
The top referring sites in 2014 were:
1. twitter.com
2. facebook.com
3. ficbook.net
4. pinterest.com
5. mentalfloss.com
Twitter and Facebook referrals are all very well but the way they hide what people are looking at means they’re no help to people running websites. Anyway, thanks as always for reading, referring and commenting! Here’s a few musical nines:
• If 6 Was 9 (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
• Nine Feet Underground (1971) by Caravan
• Nine Moons In Alaska (1971) by Beaver & Krause
• Party 9 (1973) by Faust
• Katzenmusik 9 (1979) by Michael Rother
I’ve only been reading your blog for about 3 years, but I have found it wonderfully insightful, inspirational, educational, and entertaining. Here’s to 9 more years!
Thanks, Charles. The question now will be how I feel after ten years: do I want to continue blogging every single day? I’m not sure. On the other hand, where else do I have the opportunity to write about Kraftwerk’s traffic cones?
Keep up the good work and the traffic cones.
It must take a huge effort to continually update the blog every day and it’s understandable if you wanted to step back from it after 9 years. Personally, I’d miss it if you stopped since it’s been my route into so much good art and music over the time I’ve read it. It’s a rare week that I don’t come away with a new name and something to follow up on. Thanks John….as long as you write, I will read.
Thanks, everyone. There won’t be any change just yet so don’t worry. It’s more a case of the ten-year anniversary approaching which makes me wonder whether I want to continue doing daily posts after that point. If I didn’t then I’d probably still do the weekend links since they’re a good way of bookmarking things; and I’d still do unique things like Kraftwerk and the traffic cones that you’re not likely to see anywhere else.
Posting something every single day sometimes leads you to post things simply to fill in space, and if I’m distracted with work it can feel like a chore. The upside is that over the years it’s honed my writing skills so that I’ve been able to write commissioned essays a lot more easily. And some posts have had a surprising impact, notably the long Barney Bubbles piece in 2007 which led to a book of his work being published. That was something I never expected.
Congratulations on nine years of wonders! You’re blog is fantastic and all the work you put into it appreciated by many, myself included. Thanks for sharing it all!
Thanks, Thom. You’re no slouch yourself at finding great things.