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10:18am on Tuesday, 1st January, 2013:

Easy Post

Meta

So here we are in 2013, the 13th year of the 21st century, or, if you were one of those people who thought the century started in 2000, the 14th year.

It's now a QBlog tradition around this time of year for me to relearn how to use Google Analytics so I can tell you what the most popular posts of the previous year were.

In total, there were 65,892 unique pageviews for QBlog in 2012, which is 117% of the figure for 2011. This is a surprise: I was expecting that it would fall, given that a lot of people read the content on Google+ instead. Perhaps the fact that fewer people are blogging these days has meant QBlog gets to take blogroll slots previously occupied by others? Or perhaps it's merely my monstrous publicity machine rolling inexorably on...

The top post of 2012 by visits was that of 9th January, in which I explained why, having reached level 50 in Star Wars: the Old Republic, I was continuing to subscribe. There were 1,086 unique pageviews for that, which was rather less than the high of 1,497 of 7th June, 2011 on the slutwalk phenomenon. Clearly, there are more slutwalker fans than Skywalker fans.

The next-top post of 2012, with 486 uniques, was the one on 4th May, in which I explained why now I was cancelling my SW:TOR account. This one is riddled with typos, but sadly did not get linked to by some "look at these bad typos" site, so didn't bring me oodles of visitors.

The third-top post had 228 uniques. It was the entry for 15th April and was about (who'd have thought?) SW:TOR. This is the one in which I moaned about how Bioware had misread SW:TOR's players.

The only other post from 2012 that managed over 150 uniques was this one from 22nd October about games as story machines. I quite liked that one; it may be a slow burner over the coming years.

There were a few posts that got over 150 non-unique pageviews: one about tarot cards; one that was merely a link to presentation slides, another one about SW:TOR and another link to presentation slides.

Surprisingly, some of the most popular pages from QBlog last year weren't actually written last year. This one from 2008 about Senator John McCain's election logo was the second most-popular page with 679 unique views. For reasons yet to be uncovered, this short post about an automatically-generated mathematics puzzle received 486 uniques. This 2008 post in which I illustrated my 8 player types using Duplo models managed 397 and my evergreen Stranglethorn-Vale-as-art post received a respectable 335. There were lots more that did better than most of 2012's posts, too, but the only other one to get over 300 uniques was this one with 321 about how the tank/healer/DPS trinity evolved in MMOs.

So, if I want to increase the readership of QBlog in 2013, it would seem that the thing to do would be to make posts that state for free what people normally pay me $2,500 a day to tell them.




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Copyright © 2013 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).