10,000 blog views

My blog started off 1.5 years ago as a way of communicating my science, mainly to my friends and family who don't understand most of my work, but has grown into a globally viewed entity. This is in no small part due to Facebook, Twitter and being linked to by some other popular blogs (e.g. What's in John's Freezer).

For those of you who are nerdy and interested, here's how the viewer statistics (as given by Google) break down:

Overview stats for the blog. I have set it so my page views aren't tracked but cannot guarantee I am not responsible for quite a few views.

The distribution of views is somewhat skewed by me not having been blogging since 2010, but the blog is now consistently picking up 500 views a month, which is helped by me trying to keep publishing once a month this year.

The blogs themselves make for interesting viewing with an exponential decay for the blog views, although this may be down to being able to see the newest ones by just going to the homepage rather than the individual blog posts.

The location stats are the most interesting (in my opinion). The USA and the UK being the top two view locations doesn't surprise me due to where my friends and  palaeontology readers in general are, but the Ukraine and Russia being in the top 5 surprise me. I can't remember when they peaked, but recently there have been far less viewers from those countries, so I have suspicions they were caused by some dubious linking from websites (they still count right?). That aside, I suspect Apple will be very sad that I don't have more Mac users viewing my blog with 70% of my viewers from Windows operating systems.

What have I learned?

1. That despite 10,000 views, my blog doesn't even feature in the top 5 pages of Google searches for palaeontology blog (I was vain and checked). Impressively a friend's is number one although she has since moved it from blogspot to wordpress so hopefully the new site gets back up the search list soon!
2. Blogging has been lots of fun, and actually somewhat stress relieving. It is much easier than writing the papers...
3. It doesn't take much time, and means a lot more people read my research than would otherwise through just papers. However, despite not taking much time, it requires some time to actually do some research or put together some ideas to talk about on here.
4. My blog readers love dinosaurs more than cats. My top blog post was on ornithomimosaurs, and almost three times the number of views (with the caveats that 6 months separated the two, and that readers of my blog get the most recent blogs without having to click on a specific one).
5. Not many people leave messages. Having seen YouTube comments I assumed people would be more engaged with my blogs. A wish I may yet regret...

Most importantly I want to thank anyone who has read my blog, shared links, or even offered advice and ideas for being part of it. I have a few more papers in the works, some draft blog posts on other topics ready, and hopefully my first guest blogger lined up. Make sure you check back regularly or subscribe (there should be a link below).