Yesterday I gave an overview of the year in reviews at the complete review -- a breakdown of how much and what was reviewed.
Now as far as what got read at the site .....
I'm glad I don't keep closer track of this during the year, because it would be kind of depressing: total unique visits and page views were down an astonishing 24 per cent from 2011 (and down just short of 40 per cent in 2010) -- despite an increase of 8.4 per cent in review-content since the end of 2011 (and 17.25 per cent since the end of 2010). I have no idea what the reason for the steep decline is. Pages from the site haven't returned to old-time Google-search-result heights, but seem much improved over last year, yet far fewer people sought out content.
The one country from which growth has been strong is India -- up from 4.06% of traffic in 2011 to 5.71% in 2012 (and jumping past Canada (down from 6.45% to 5.11%) into third spot behind the US and UK as the nation sending the most visitors to the site.
As far as visitors from individual cities go, London (3.53% of all traffic, up from 2.92%) jumped past New York (3.20%, up slightly from 3.15%) to take the top spot, while New Delhi jumped from eighth to third place.
In all, there were visitors from 215 countries in 2012, with 101 sending an average of at least one visitor a day, and 157 at least one a week. (Among the countries sending no visitors was South Sudan -- though Sudan itself ranked a respectable 116th as a source of traffic (and, for example, Somalia (187th) sent almost as much traffic as Liechtenstein (186th).)
Search traffic remained by far the biggest source of traffic, and Google remained the dominant search engine visitors used to get to the site -- accounting for over 90 per cent of search traffic (up slightly over 2011, while Bing's share, for example, dropped from 4.32% to 3.98%).
The top five search queries sending visitors to the site were:
Not surprisingly, traffic from visitors using iPads increased dramatically -- almost doubling. In 2011 there was still more traffic from iPhones than iPads, and even though iPhone traffic also increased dramatically it couldn't keep pace.
For the most-viewed reviews of the year, see the top 50 of 2012. It looks a lot like the 2011 list; shockingly the best performance by a first-published-anywhere-in-English-in-2012 title was My Struggle (UK title: A Death in the Family) by Karl Ove Knausgaard -- in 125th (!).
The exhaustive and comprehensive 2012 'state of the site' survey will appear at the end of the month. Meanwhile, though the amount of traffic has little bearing on what actually gets done at the site, I wouldn't mind seeing a reversal of that recent and slightly demoralizing downwardspiral trend.
(Given the international focus hereabouts, and with the bulk of the loss in traffic coming from the US (down 16.26%), the UK (down 23.68%), and Canada, I can't help but worry that it also in part reflects a loss of interest in that whole fiction-in-translation thing -- odd, because internet coverage of it seems as extensive and interesting as ever (but maybe it's just a small circle of the same readers and online-writers who are paying much attention to it ...).)
Now as far as what got read at the site .....
I'm glad I don't keep closer track of this during the year, because it would be kind of depressing: total unique visits and page views were down an astonishing 24 per cent from 2011 (and down just short of 40 per cent in 2010) -- despite an increase of 8.4 per cent in review-content since the end of 2011 (and 17.25 per cent since the end of 2010). I have no idea what the reason for the steep decline is. Pages from the site haven't returned to old-time Google-search-result heights, but seem much improved over last year, yet far fewer people sought out content.
The one country from which growth has been strong is India -- up from 4.06% of traffic in 2011 to 5.71% in 2012 (and jumping past Canada (down from 6.45% to 5.11%) into third spot behind the US and UK as the nation sending the most visitors to the site.
As far as visitors from individual cities go, London (3.53% of all traffic, up from 2.92%) jumped past New York (3.20%, up slightly from 3.15%) to take the top spot, while New Delhi jumped from eighth to third place.
In all, there were visitors from 215 countries in 2012, with 101 sending an average of at least one visitor a day, and 157 at least one a week. (Among the countries sending no visitors was South Sudan -- though Sudan itself ranked a respectable 116th as a source of traffic (and, for example, Somalia (187th) sent almost as much traffic as Liechtenstein (186th).)
Search traffic remained by far the biggest source of traffic, and Google remained the dominant search engine visitors used to get to the site -- accounting for over 90 per cent of search traffic (up slightly over 2011, while Bing's share, for example, dropped from 4.32% to 3.98%).
The top five search queries sending visitors to the site were:
- literary saloon
- complete review
- book review sites
- the complete review
- porno
Not surprisingly, traffic from visitors using iPads increased dramatically -- almost doubling. In 2011 there was still more traffic from iPhones than iPads, and even though iPhone traffic also increased dramatically it couldn't keep pace.
For the most-viewed reviews of the year, see the top 50 of 2012. It looks a lot like the 2011 list; shockingly the best performance by a first-published-anywhere-in-English-in-2012 title was My Struggle (UK title: A Death in the Family) by Karl Ove Knausgaard -- in 125th (!).
The exhaustive and comprehensive 2012 'state of the site' survey will appear at the end of the month. Meanwhile, though the amount of traffic has little bearing on what actually gets done at the site, I wouldn't mind seeing a reversal of that recent and slightly demoralizing downward