It was an interesting year for From the Sidelines with unexpected solid growth in traffic ending in an abrupt collapse in visits and pageviews. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say, so take a look at this traffic cliff via Google Analytics:
While I still can’t concretely say why things went that way, the most likely explanation is that Google demoted my site after I altered the robots.txt. That was done to make Bing/Yahoo finally index everything. Despite submitting the proper sitemaps to Bing, that search engine was never able to crawl the whole archive of posts after many months of trying.
So I tried adding the relevant sitemap coding for overcoming Blogger’s limits of showing only the last 25 posts to the robots.txt. It worked like a charm and made everything visible to Bing’s spider. A week later and Google capped me at 150 impressions a day for the blog. Suffice it to say that the microscopic uptick in traffic from Bing/Yahoo failed to make up for that.
Really, does anybody use Bing?
The good news is that after reverting the code weeks ago, I am finally past that cap. But the momentum is gone and it will be interesting to see if it ever returns. It makes my estimate of getting my first payment from AdSense in 8-10 years look optimistic, doesn’t it?
Incorporating ads into the blog, or monetizing it, was another experiment started late in the year. Being cynical about the effectiveness of ads online, I figured it was time to play around with them and learn something new. About all I learned is that nobody clicks on them (not a surprise) and that they are a pain in the rear to incorporate into the layout. So far, not a positive experience, but I really wasn’t expecting one.
It is always fascinating to see what other people are reading on my blog. For a gander at what Blogger shows as my most popular posts, just look to the right for the current week and scroll down for all time hits. Sadly, referral spam distorts that and I wonder if Blogger will ever filter that out of the stats. Too many bots from Russia screw up the stats for small time blogs like mine with many a false hope of traffic to come for newbies unaware of what’s really going on.
So Analytics will provide the real data for the year and these are the top read posts for the year 2012:
- Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
- Citizen Kane (1941)
- Bleach Season 1 Episodes 1 and 2
- Godzilla, King of Monsters (1956)
- Batman Begins (2005)
- Frankenstein (1931)
- The Dark Knight (2008)
- Kimi ni Todoke Volume 1
- Gamera: Revenge of Iris (1999)
- Gojira (1954)
- Dracula (1931)
- Beowulf Director’s Cut (2007)
- Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidora (2001)
- Thirteen Days (2000)
- Gamera 2: Advent of Legion (1996)
The all time champions Citizen Kane and Bleach are safely ensconced near the top, but Chris Nolan’s Batman films are fast climbers. So is Captain America which surprised me be being number one. But the real surprise was Beowulf. It was climbing like a rocket until the traffic collapse. That was a review I never expected to get any traffic for -- which shows what I know. It was popular from the moment it went up and then got a huge boost of traffic from someone linking to it from a Gawker chat.
According to Analytics, 9,386 unique visitors looked at From the Sidelines in 2012. Of course, that isn’t really accurate since there are people with script blocking software, spoofing, and multiple devices. It is a rough figure which is still better than what you see in Blogger. 20,369 pages were served to those visitors and they looked at 1.86 pages a visit. Average duration of a visit was 1 minute and 15 seconds while 85.74% of traffic was new visits.
If only they would scroll down that 0.86 of a page to finish it!
I kid of course, that isn’t how it works. This feels like typing a disclaimer on packaging, but there are quite a few international visitors that won’t catch the English language sarcasm.
Which is a good segue into what I enjoy most about having the blog: the visitors from all around the globe. It is amazing to realize people from some of the farthest reaches are at least glancing at what I post and I wouldn’t trade that for higher traffic. Bullet point listing all the countries/territories would cause an amazing amount of scrolling since there are 124, but I’m going to type out the longest sentence this blog has ever seen.
In order of traffic, I had visitors from: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Philippines, France, Australia, Germany, Mexico, Italy, Thailand, Spain, Indonesia, Poland, Japan, Russia (yes, legitimate visitors not just bots do exist!), Netherlands, Argentina, India, Sweden, Malaysia, Greece, Portugal, Hungary, South Korea, Turkey, Chile, Belgium, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Peru, Finland, Romania, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Columbia, Norway, Denmark, Egypt, Austria, Czech Republic, New Zealand, Pakistan, Vietnam, Croatia, Ireland, Serbia, South Africa, Slovakia, Ukraine, Switzerland, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Bulgaria, United Arab Emirates, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Israel, Algeria, Morocco, Ecuador, Tunisia, Dominican Republic, Estonia, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Slovenia, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bolivia, Georgia, Iraq, El Salvador, Bahrain, Guatemala, Guam, Iceland, Panama, China, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Jordan, Lebanon, Latvia, Macedonia, Burma, Reunion, Albania, Armenia, Barbados, Bangladesh, Brunei, Guyana, Honduras, Cambodia, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Oman, Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Bermuda, Bahamas, Bhutan, Belarus, Belize, Cyprus, Dominica, Isle of Man, Iran, Kenya, Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Malta, Mauritius, Maldives, Nicaragua, Nepal, French Polynesia, Senegal, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.
Yeah, my fingers hurt after typing that sentence.
I have no clue what traffic will be like in 2013. Before the traffic crash, I would have said ever increasing traffic due to the the chart. Dropping to a fifth of what I was getting looks fatal and only time will tell.
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