Blog stats: 2010

There seems to be a tradition around of mentioning some blog stats at the end of the year. So herewith are the basic numbers for this humble blog in 2010:

Total hits: 44,829

That number excludes my own hits. It's real readers only.

Individual readers: 35,007

There'll be some duplication there from regular readers who use multiple IP addresses, but the true number is clearly well in excess of 34,000. Most of those people came in via external link recommendations, not, to my surprise, from google searches.

Most hits on a single day: 852

That was the post on how to use the autocorrect feature in Word, which stunned me with its popularity. Is Word really that interesting? People still hit it heavily to this day.

Average hits per day, every day, over the entire year: 123

Average unique readers per day: 96

Number of posts: 147

One every three days. I'm such a slacker.



So that's it for the stats that are Gary-specific. Now for some general technology stats that fascinated me.

Most popular incoming search engine: Google at 98%+

Next is Yahoo at 1%, then Ask. If I were the product manager for Microsoft bing, I'd slit my wrists now.

Most popular browsers: Firefox (43%), IE (23%), Chrome (15%), Safari (8%)

IE is dramatically down, but that's no surprise given the rise of excellent alternatives. I started using Chrome in 2010 once AdBlock became available for it. I'm a bit surprised Chrome adoption isn't higher.

And here comes what for me is the stunner. Most popular operating system:

30.80% MacOSX
24.60% WinXP
18.60% WinVista
18.00% Win7
2.80% Linux

For the first time in history, MacOS beats out Windows on a per-version basis. Granted the total Windows is 60% of home machines, but that is still a massive degradation. It's not hard to work out where to point the finger: Vista is the Worst Operating System Ever. I'm amazed 18% of people still use it.

25% cling to XP to avoid Vista. My guess is many of those that had to shift off XP, probably due to forced hardware replacement, obviously decided that they might as well go to the Mac to avoid Vista.

BillG used to talk about "betting the company" on each new release of Windows. With Vista, they might finally have lost. That only 18% are on Windows 7 has to be depressing my friends in Redmond. They desperately need to convert that into 60% on Windows 7, and then start clawing back the lost users.

14 comments:

Lexi said...

Happy new year!

I'm not surprised at the bing stats. Everyone hates bing, don't they? I had a terrible job removing it from my new laptop.

Gary Corby said...

Hi Lexi!

Congratulations on a terrific year with Remix!

I can't recall anyone ever talking about bing at all. Which might be part of their problem.

Geoff Carter said...

Congratulations.

You do better than most archaeologists, [like me], because you make up better stories about the past!

Gary Corby said...

Hi Geoff, writers are such creative liars. I don't think anyone keeps comparative blog stats per author, but then, there's nothing to suggest blog popularity correlates with book sales either. (Exactly this topic came up on twitter the other day!)

I promise you if I were a literary agent you could put a zero at the end of every one of those numbers. And if I were Neil Gaiman you could probably put two zeroes.

Vicky Alvear Shecter said...

"Writers are such creative liars." So true. Can I borrow that line?

writtenwyrdd said...

My most frequently hit posts are the two that mention sentence diagramming. In one I talk about how to do it and (ironically) why I think teaching that stuff is idiocy; and the other is a link to a software program that will make the diagrams.

I wouldn't know how to figure out which hits were me and which weren't, or even anything else statistical. But I think my daily hit is something like 50 on a most excellent day.

Karin said...

Hi there down under,

Some of the comments are from Jan 6th, but here in Sweden we're still on the very cold and full of snow 5th of January.

I just started a blog and think I've figured out how to list favourite blogs in a blogroll.

Good statistics I think, for you. And I'm afraid that Bill Gates deserves being beaten by Mac as long as he doesn't live up to standardization promises - it's not only a Vista problem and MacOs is performing so much better in countries outside US.

Anyway: Thanks for good reading during 2010 and I look forward to more.

LQQinSpace said...

Hi Gary,

I dscovered your blog through that Word posting. I think there was a link though Janet Reid. I have also been using the tips – hoteldv becomes Hôtel de Ville and C-E becomes Champs-Élysées.

I have Vista on my laptop – not a fan. That lap top is odd anyway, I boght it in Switzerland and it has a German keyboard. The Y and Z have swapped places – my surname is Lynch and my novel is about a man called Salazar. Somehow my fingers seem to know which keyboard they are using, but for a long time I was Lznch.

I am suprised by MacOS topping the list – perhaps blog readers and writers prefer Macs. I contributed to that Linux stat on my netbook – which I have now converted to XP as I wanted to use Word.

Do these figures pick up RSS feeds (google reader) I read your bog at work that way (in my breaks!) but your actual blogger site is blocked.

Seth

LQQinSpace said...

Or perhaps it is iPads

scaryazeri said...

Oh no, I forgot to publish my stats! Happy New year!

L. T. Host said...

My blog stats for 2010:

Um, I had a blog?

:D

I actually love reading this stuff from other people but have yet to develop the savvy to figure it out on my own. The three times I've tried, things have gone all wonky and started ticking and smoking, so I figure it's probably best for a mild-obsessed personality such as myself to NOT have access to that info. And sit back and enjoy others' stats instead.

2010 was a good year! Here's to 2011 :)

Gary Corby said...

You're welcome to the line, Vicky!

On collecting stats... most blog systems have ways to tell you how many hits a site is getting, and there are relatively simple third party thingies that will do it too. Usually you have to insert a small amount of auto-generated javascript into your blog template. The javascript gets run every time a page is loaded and records the IP address of the reader and what page was read. Excluding yourself is easy...just exclude your own IP address from the stats. Most systems have a way to do that.

Gary Corby said...

Seth, anything that touches the blog site is included, so that would include most RSS feeds. In short, if a page is loaded from the blog host then that's a hit.

There are some web-based RSS reader sites that cache blogs and therefore don't reload the page. Those would not score as a hit. So yes, the hit count might be too low. But it's not like these are life-and-death stats! I rarely look at them, and then only out of morbid interest.

Gary Corby said...

It's nice and muggy warm and very humid here, Karin. I think you're probably better off with snow.

Karin and Seth...on the MacOS supremacy...I was surprised. I've never seen anything like it in past years. Graphics people tend strongly to be Mac people, but writers are not necessarily so, because unless you're JK Rowling you need something cheap. Stats I've seen in past years have Windows at 90%+. This change within a year is dramatic.