Second Anniversary of My Blog; Discovery of Its Much Greater Popularity

I am posting this report in commemoration of the second anniversary of my blog, which I launched on November 27, 2008. I am pleased to report that it is much more popular than I realized, apparently by orders of magnitude.

Statcounter tracks pageviews from visitors that do not block its ability to track them. Blogger, the host of my blog, began in June to track and log all pageviews, but with far less specificity. For the first few months, I did not even notice the existence of Blogger’s statistics. Even once I did, I thought they must have been erroneous, as it was reporting far more activity than Statcounter in terms of pageviews (although some of these were my own until I blocked them in order not to inflate the total), countries of origin and particular posts viewed. Because Blogger was reporting the data more imprecisely, however, I could not make sense of it until a fellow blogger who uses the same host mentioned to me privately about those who block the counter’s ability to track all of their pageviews, much as I block its ability to track my own so as not to inflate the total. It was only then that I suddenly realized that Blogger’s statistical information was, in fact, accurate.

What Blogger’s statistics revealed were helpful once I analyzed them more closely, although because it does not track individual visitors, I cannot distinguish between pageviews and visits. Blogger’s statistics reveal that there have been many more pageviews of my blog, both from the United States and around the world. There have been two and a half times more pageviews from foreign states than I had known, especially in Europe! For example, there have been several score pageviews more than I had known from the Netherlands, Russia and Germany each. There have also been dozens from Latvia, from which I previously had been unaware of any, as well as dozens more from France than I had known. The next highest total comes from Poland. Since I have recently begun to observe Blogger’s statistics on a daily basis, I have noticed additionally that my blog has been visited from several other foreign states, from which I had not been aware of any visits, especially from Eastern Europe. Also, not only are some of my posts even more popular than I had known but, more of them have been viewed.

These findings perhaps reveal that what had seemed like a relative dearth of visits to my blog from Continental Europe was not true. They also explain a number of phenomena: the greater number of pageviews of my profile than I had been noticing that Statcounter had tracked, comments on posts that occasionally did not correspond to the times of any visits that day, and private compliments about my blog from acquaintances that I could not identify as having visited it at all.

The main discovery is that my blog is visited significantly more frequently and by a wider audience than I had known. I am grateful to both Statcounter and Blogger for their tracking services, but especially to you, my visitors. You have made this blog successful these first two years. Thank you!

I recommend to my loyal visitors who are fellow bloggers with the same blog host to also analyze Blogger’s statistics.