2017 in (blogging) numbers

2017 just finished and I wanted to take a quick look at how my blog performed these past 12 months. This is just for fun, though, as my blog is not a business or anything and I don’t earn money with it. Heck, I don’t spend any money on it either, hehe. Thanks for the free plan, WordPress!

2017 saw quite a bump in the number of views and visitors my blog got. I am not sure why this happened, as I didn’t do anything special and I still don’t have a Facebook page or do anything else to promote my posts. As you can see on the graph, the number of views and visitors in 2015 and 2016 was more or less the same. Regarding the number of comments, more views definitely don’t translate into more comments, on the contrary: I got way more comments in 2015 and 2016 than last year, when people came, saw, and remained silent.

My blog is going to turn 4 in a few days, by the way. Don’t think there will be a party or anything, although I’m very glad I still write regularly!

Regarding the most visited posts of last year, the absolute winner (by a huge difference) was my article about dangerous food combinations, although it was published in October 2016. I wrote that post in a humorous tone and I don’t think it can be taken too seriously, but every day people are finding my blog because they search in Google if this and that thing can be eaten together. Especially persimmons! Although there were other searches, like “can I die drink milk after eat pineapple” (I don’t think you can), “are pineapples and pears a good combination” (doesn’t sound too appetising to me, but whatever rocks your boat), and even “is tomato and egg dangerous food poisoning” (definitely not, scrambled eggs with tomato is a very popular Chinese dish). Posts about food are usually popular, and my third most viewed one is also about food: 10 Chinese dishes that foreigners find gross, also written in 2016. The second most viewed post was one written in 2017 (at last), and it was about the beauty standards in China.

Who would have thought this was going to be my most popular post…

How did people arrive to my blog? Most of them ended up here after doing a web search (probably related to persimmons, haha). The silver medal for bringing me traffic goes to Facebook, where some people must have shared some of my posts. The third position is for the WordPress reader, where the people that follow my blog get new posts. Other independent, external websites that appear in my top 10 referrers are Speaking of China, Real Gunners, When West Dates East, We are Suzhou and Nihao Cassandra. Thank you, guys!

And where do my readers live? Most of my views come from the US, although this number is not reliable as it probably includes many people who are in China and use a VPN. The second position is for China, thanks to the fact that WordPress was unblocked a couple of years ago. Other countries in the top 10 are, in this order: Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, Spain, Hong Kong and India. I had visits from most countries in the world, though! (All the coloured in yellow-orange).

And those are the numbers from 2017! Let’s hope I manage to keep finding topics to write about in 2018!

Category : Internet
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