As a blogger I have developed an unhealthy preoccupation with analysing readership. I don’t generally let it affect my output, but I do like looking at how people come here, where they are from, and assorted other statistical information.
One thing has stood out in recent months with regard to visitors to this blog. I am not sure if the same trend is being repeated for other blogs out there.
Since the beginning of the autumn I have noticed that a higher percentage of my readers are Irish. Based on comments alone my readership is almost exclusively Irish, but based on web stats, my Irish readership has grown – especially during office hours – from miserly low percentages like 2 or 3%, to significant portions of 20-25%. Getting later into the evening the US eastern seaboard kicks in and the huge majority of readers between about 9pm and 1am are from there.
I could put this down to a higher awareness of blogs in Ireland, or the growth in the number of Irish blogs – bloggers tend to read other people’s blogs. But I wonder is it a trend that is being seen by other Irish blogs. The visitors have certainly changed in the last 42 months.
Comments
7 responses to “On readership”
I get 1/3 Irish, 1/3 American (likely by chance), 1/5 UK and (bizarrely) 1/25 New Zealand.
Indeed. Stats are strangely interesting. I’m most interested in where – not national, but ‘institution’ so to speak – they come from.
Ya the ones i get tend to be Irish. But since i tend to blog exclusivly about Irish poltics. It is probably not unusulble. Get links from Google searchs about eddie hobbs and barry mcsweeny. Even though around the time of the london bomb attacks i was the top link in google for alquida(spelt correctly I can’t spell) in europe. Which got me a pile of links.
Have gotten in the pass one or two readers from the american military which is nice.
Mine varies according to what I’m writing about. Currently, it’s about 40% US, 25% Ireland and 20%UK and the rest scattered around.
Some of these stats are not quite right either. Or at least they didn’t used to be. I know when I worked for Citibank here all people surfing from our offices were “from the US” in any stats. That’s because all web traffic traveled to the US first via the internal network before heading out onto the ‘net’. I know this was pretty normal for big US companies here at the time (2000) and probably still is.
I have to admit, after discovering this website I’ve started reading a lot more irish blogs (I’m based in London), as they tend to offer an interesting perspective on UK and international events. Plus, that Twenty Major is a nutter and provides a rather amusing start to the day.
Don’t worry gavin, you’re still my favourite – i’ve lost count of the number of interesting articles I’ve missed and only had my attention drawn to because of your site. Keep up the good work; you save me having to trawl through the iht every bloody day.
I’m not Irish – but I have to say the name of your blog made me look in via http://twentymajor.blogspot.com/ via http://pubphilosopher.blogs.com/ via
http://www.britblog.com/directory/interest/beer.html
Any chance your stats our including our aggregator in there. We changed they way it worked which resulted in it being more frequent, so it may be skewing your stats.