Stats so far

I like to do this updates once a year. There are any number of anniversaries I could pick for the start of this blog. It began in March 2005, lasted 10 posts and went the way of many blogs. Then it came back to life in September of that year, shortly after I moved to the north.

But the one I can certainly keep track of was when I signed up to use Statcounter, which was October 5, 2005. And as that anniversary just past, I figured it was worth taking a look to see what my traffic was like in the second year compared to the first.

So from October 2005 to September 2006, this is what my stats looked like"



Or, I had 39,259 page loads from 26,697 unique visitors.

Now, this is what October 2006 to September 2007 looked like:



In that 12 month period I had 58,602 page loads from 42,851 unique visitors. Essentially, I had a 50 per cent increase in page loads and visitors from one year to the next.

It's no doubt greedy that I would have liked a bigger increase. I was actually hoping for something close to a 100 per cent increase, but that was probably unrealistic. And while I have done things like update the blog almost daily, which helps traffic, there are certainly other measures to boost traffic that I didn't use. I don't link enough, my blog's focus is rather scattershot and it's certainly not the prettiest one around.

In terms of Newfoundland blogs, I figure it makes me mid to upper range. Certainly not in Ed Hollett or Damian Penny territory, but pretty respectable. For a Nunavut blogger I guess I would be near the top. Then again, there are probably only 20 of us who update on a regular basis, I won't brag too much about that.

What does all this mean? Pretty much nothing. I don't make a cent from the blog. I've never seen the need to put ads on the blog because I would only make pennies off of it. And that little change isn't worth making the site look ugly.

I just like know there are people who read the blog and that maybe they get some enjoyment out of it. There's also something else to take into account. When I worked with The Express, I had a reasonably popular column. The circulation of The Express was 40,000 a week. Assuming a third of those papers were dumped by the carriers without ever being delivered (and you thought you had carrier problems, Kate) or tossed by people without it being looked at, and then throw in some more who simply hated what I wrote (hard to believe, but they do exist), maybe 20,000 to 25,000 people read me a week. I had 42,000 pop by to visit in a year.

Ah well. Back to reality...