Wednesday, May 28, 2008

I Hear Ya!

“Tell wordbones that he needs to update his blog.”

One of my coworkers passed that message on to me this morning. It came from a buddy of mine.

Okay, I haven’t exactly been a posting machine lately, but at least I am doing better than I was at this time last year. Last May I only posted four times, with this post it will be thirteen for this May and I still have three days to go.

The fact of the matter is that I have been working on my next column for the Business Monthly. I also have to squeeze my writing into the time I have between my real job and the job of raising a little girl.

Discretionary time is sometimes at a premium.

That all being said, I have been meaning to do a post on the readership of Tales of Two Cities for some time now so perhaps now is a good time. Every so often I’ll get an anonymous comment about how blog readership, and this blog in particular, is declining. That is not quite accurate. In fact, last May, the monthly number of visits to this blog was 847. Last month the number of visits was 2,381. Any reader can check this out for themselves by clicking on the little site meter icon at the bottom of this page.

I am humbled by this response. Thank you to all who have dropped by.

Some other interesting stats: the average time spent on this site is 2:24 minutes, the top ten cities that visitors have come from are 1) Columbia, 2) Baltimore, 3) Simpsonville, 4) Ellicott City, 5) Brooklyn, 6) Washington, DC, 7) Long Island City, 8) Summit Argo, 9) Catonsville and 10) Allston.

Summit Argo?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe there's no relationship, but if you're producing went from 4 to 13, wouldn't you expect readership to rise similarly? You would have to see 2700 hits vs. the 2300.

Maybe I missed this as well, but did you mean to say readers or hits? How many unique readers? Not how many page hits, or visits, but how many actual people visit? That would be the interesting component.

Anonymous said...

me again.

Because, you see, if people drop by once daily - and I'm being liberal here because many readers drop by more than once - then you had 80 readers in May.

80 is a great group of involved people paying attention. But it's hardly the circulation of Business Monthly.

wordbones said...

Anon,

The measurement unit is "visits". I am not sure how that translates into people. I do know, courtesy of Google Analytics, that over the last thirty days, Tales of Two Cities has been "visited" 2,215 times. GA also tells me that 875 of those visits were "Absolute Unique Visitors".

I still don't know how that equates to humans.

I completely agree that the Business Monthly covers a wider audience. Please pick up a copy today.

-wb

Anonymous said...

The only statistic that matters is how much you enjoy writing this blog. Everything else is a bonus.

Anonymous said...

What is a unique visitor? Does that mean that the average reader visits twice monthly?

Anonymous said...

I read the GA definition as absolute visitors meaning likely 1 for 1 people. 875 is a lot of people, but 2.5 times monthly? Are they reading the latest post, or several pages?

See, now you've opened this whole can of worms.