2024 Blog Stats

OverviewLike last year, the number of people who came to read something on this site increased—in fact, as I write this, with just a few days to go until the end of the year—the numbers for 2024 are the highest for nine years and within touching distance of the numbers I achieved the very first year of this iteration of my website. (They are, of course, nowhere near close to the numbers I used to get at Ask Nicola in the heyday of blogging, but given the advent and then rise of social media, these numbers feel pretty good.)I posted slightly more often—93 posts, including tomorrow’s—though a number were brief and informational: notices of appearances, links to interviews, and so on.As I did last year, I enjoyed doing a handful of Snippets posts and this year added updates on things like H5N1I did more opinion and thinking-aloud posts than last year, such as The Paradox of Tolerance and Identity, Social Location, and DEI, plus the usual personal-moments entries, such as 35 Years in the US.Where you came from2024

Image description: Map of the world showing density of visitors by country. The USA is coloured brown, the UK a lighter brown, and the rest of the world pale tan—with some countries (mainly in central Africa and the far north) showing blank.

As you can see, people come from a lot of countries. The Top 3 countries from where my readers log on haven’t changed at all from last year, but the rest played musical chair with Spain and Italy dropping off the Top 10 list and being replaced by South Korea and Ireland:

USUKCanadaIrelandAustraliaGermanySouth KoreaIndiaFranceNetherlandsHow you got hereReferrers

As usual the vast majority of you got here via web search. I was delighted to see how much impact Bluesky is having—it’s currently my favourite social media hangout (I’ve been gone from Xitter for a while—I doubt it will even make the list next year)—and also interested in the fact that Wikipedia seems to be a useful source. At some point I need to get my Wikipedia pages cleaned up—all of them are riddled with errors and omissions.

search enginesFacebookBlueskyXWikipediaBrowsers

Again, Chrome was the most popular but Safari wasn’t far behind this time

ChromeSafariOtherFirefoxEdgeSearch terms and devices

The search terms themselves were very boring: my name and its variants, mainly, with some book titles or characters, with a few disability-related terms and one or two Old English words. Overall though, there were disappointingly few amusements to be found, unlike, say, 2010 on Ask Nicola.

The machines you used to get here were:

Mobile—57%Desktop—40%Tablet—4%

iPhone outdid Android, by a fair margin, Windows topped Mac—but only just—and the iPad beat Linux and Android tablet combined.

What you liked when you got here

This year once again I didn’t talk much about the cats (except George’s unequal match with a tribe of raccoons)—there was too much other stuff going on. I did post photos of them a fair bit on social media. I also returned to writing Snippets posts—bulleted paragraphs of miscellaneous items I find interesting. This is something I used to do a decade or two ago when I blogged at least once a day. I don’t see myself returning to that kind of frequency but I’d forgotten how much I enjoy doing this kind of not-about-me-just-randomly-interesting posts.

Top 10 New Posts

Of the Top 10 New Posts in 2024, only one (Aud is Back!) was purely book-related. The others were a mix of thinky, newsy, and personal:

The Paradox of ToleranceThe Cost of Bathing While DisabledA Miracle Built on a MomentAuthor Bios—saying the quiet part aloudSnippets—Sex chromsome syndromes in historyAud is Back! Cover reveal and pre-orderBird Flu: It’s time to talkThe Queer MedievalCelebrating Hild’s Feast DayIdentity, Social Location, and DEITop 10 Posts Overall

The Top 10 most-visited posts this year were a bit different—a much greater proportion (40%) were new,* and of the perennial favourites, many bangers of the past—Lame is So Gay, Books About Women Don’t Win Big Awards, Huge New: MS is a Metabolic Disorder—almost disappearing for the first time since they were published in 2011, 2015, and 2012 respectively:

Men Are Afraid Women Will Laugh At ThemThe Paradox of Tolerance*The Cost of Bathing While Disabled*A Miracle Built on a Moment*Song of Ice and Fire Speculative MapAuthor Bios: Saying the quiet part aloud*Hild: A historical noteHild and Her GemæcceFiction that passes the Fries Test3 Maps of Early Medieval Britain to DownloadLooking ahead

Headline: the same as last year—this blog is not going anywhere; I’m here to stay.

For several years, traffic to my post dropped steadily—and, for a few years, precipitously. Most obviously, though: readers stopped leaving comments. If I was not also on various social media platforms I might have felt as though I were shouting into the void. But what was happening was that people were talking about the posts, just not here. They left brief notes on Twitter, and Facebook, and—to a much lesser extent—Instagram. But four years ago, early in the pandemic, the number of visitors to this site stabilised and then 2 years ago started going up. This year the numbers are up again—the best since 2015 (the first year this WordPress site went up). The number of comments has also stabilised and are in fact creeping up, though—like the visitor numbers—are just a fraction of what they were ten years ago.

(FYI, this is also true of my research website, Gemæcce. I posted there only seven times this year, yet 2024 had the highest number of visitors since the WordPress site began.)

My guess is that this is a reflection of what’s been happening with social media: a continuing fragmentation and loss of centre, plus the ever-increasing thicket of trolls and bot-based lifeforms, not to mention the barbed bramble of adverts blocking the path to conversation. Blogs like this, with no advertising, can be a haven of calm.

I’m relatively content with the new equilibrium. I enjoy writing the posts and people seem to enjoy reading them. So I’m not going anywhere. This blog is here to stay. Xitter’s implosion has made no discernible difference to my traffic—I deleted my profile there with no regrets—but is, rather, another demonstration of why we all, and creators in particular, need to own our own platforms. Even if I thought all those other social platforms really were being run as public utilities for the greater good (ha ha ha), I like being able to say things too long for Bluesky (currently my favourite) or Threads and not pretty enough for Instagram. This is the best place to do that.

Will I start a newsletter (or post on Medium or Substack)? No. For the simple reason that this blog functions as a newsletter. All you have to do is subscribe (in desktop view, just look at the top of the right hand sidebar; in mobile platforms, scroll right to the end of an individual post), and every new post will be delivered directly to your mailbox the minute it’s published. No muss, no fuss—just like any other newsletter, except that a) you don’t have to pay, you will never have to pay, b) I’ll never share your data with anyone for anything, c) there will be no adverts. Plus, on a blog you can talk back if you like, safe in the knowledge that I’m in full control of the comments.

Right now I have no particular plans for big changes here. I like this blog; I’ve been doing this or something like this for nearly 30 years. But I am planning to work on an additional platform with a different audience andn to a different purpose. So stay tuned.