Hi everyone, Happy New Year and all that. Thought I’d kick off with the usual feedback post on last year’s blog stats:
According to Google Analytics, overall reader stats for 2018 were:
328,887 ‘unique visitors’ – not quite the same as ‘different readers’ – if you read the blog on your PC, laptop and mobile, that counts as 3 people. Within the year, the usual trend – a weekly cycle of low weekend reads, and summer and Christmas lulls (see graph). Those numbers are pretty much identical to previous years, which I’m happy with as there were several glitches this year – Google Analytics went down mid-year, and then the email notifications to 5,000 or so subscribers stopped going out for three months, which shows up clearly in the stats – no email reminder and the world forgets all about you. Tragic.
January was a busy month – the two spikes you can see are for the post on Oxfam’s annual Davos report on 22nd, and Alice Evans’ great ‘sausagefest’ post on 11th (see below).
Most-read Posts: these continue to surprise me – only three of the top 10 were new – who says blogging is ephemeral? Apart from a possible bias towards aid industry related topics, I can see very little pattern behind this list – could someone please tell me why a 2009 post on climate change in South Africa is top with 19,000 hits in 2018?
- How is climate change affecting South Africa? (a 2009 post – the oldest in the list).
- 10 top thinkers on Development, summarized in 700 words by Stefan Dercon (2018)
- The Perils of Male Bias: Alice Evans replies to yesterday’s ‘Sausagefest’(2018)
- Development Studies is fun, but is there a job at the end of it? (2018)
- Venezuela: Latin America’s inequality success story [a story from 2010, dug up by some right wingers to have a go at Oxfam]
- Religion and Development: what are the links? Why should we care? (from 2011)
- How does emigration affect countries-of-origin? Paul Collier kicks off a debate on migration (2014 post, presumably Brexit-related)
- How to get a PhD in a year and still do the day job (from 2011)
- $15bn is spent every year on training, with disappointing results. Why the aid industry needs to rethink ‘capacity building’. (2017)
- Are women really 70% of the world’s poor? How do we know? (2010)
Where were the readers from? As usual, US and UK dominate, but then it gets more interesting, with South Africa, India and the Philippines breaking up the Northern stranglehold.
If all goes to plan, next year’s annual report should look very different. After 10 years, 2,500 posts, 12,500 comments and 2.4 million readers, it’s time to change things up. We’re currently recruiting for someone to help us decolonise the blog, (applications closed, sorry) by sourcing top quality written, audio and video content from the Global South. Watch this space. But I’ll still be banging on about stuff too – it’s too much fun to stop!