I thought I’d summarise some of my blog statistics for July. My main source of hits was, as ever, google. What would we do without it?
Thanks, though, to Alice, Max, Jenny, Aidan and Jase for voluntarily providing links to me. The hit rate is as follows:
Alice 33
Max 18
Jenny 5
Aidan 4
Jase 1
Of course, blatant self-publicity generates a fair amount of traffic. Posting at koreanfilm.org and putting your url under your signature is a fairly common and, I think, generally accepted way of generating traffic (25 hits last month). And then there’s the amazing cross-platform blogging infrastructure, whereby if you link to an article in someone else’s blog, that blog automatically finds out that you’re linking to it and automatically links back to you. And if it doesn’t, then you can give the Trackback system a prod and it does it for you. Always good for a hit or two, particularly if you link to a popular blog.
But the strangest source of traffic is www.disney.com, which resulted in 83 visits during July. We welcome all visitors from the magic kingdom.
Favourite searches which result in my blog being hit? Apart from the obvious combinations of London, Korean, Festival, Society, hallyu, etc, the urbanely charming Lee Hyolee tops the list (15 hits), and in the same category is SG Wannabe (10 hits) and BoA (3 hits). I’ve got a review of Bi / Rain’s first album ready to go, so soon my hit rate will increase. I remember one of the established Korean bloggers commenting once that all he had to do was mention the name of a certain Korean glamour model (Lee Sabi) and his traffic went through the roof. Just mention the name: you don’t have to say anything about the person1.
More esoteric searches are for the saemaeul movement (4 hits), and 12 hits from people wanting to find the DPRK embassy, food that is eaten in Afghanistan (3 hits), and most strange of all “united kingdom hydrographic office taunton somerset tai 2dn uk” (1 hit). Don’t ask me how the last one came up with my site.
Finally, there are hits arising from people googling themselves. To spare blushes, I shan’t mention names. You know who you are. I confess, I do it myself. It’s not vanity at all, I promise. It’s to check that the googlebot is crawling my site with sufficient depth and regularity. Honest.
I get a few hits from bandwidth hogs – nothing serious at the moment but I’m monitoring the situation. Mainly pop forums who are linking to some of my pictures. Frankly, I’m amazed that people ever find this site so I don’t mind them taking a liberty or two, for the moment at any rate.
Total hits in July: 34,755. Total unique visitors (allegedly) 2,661.
Set out below are various traffic trendlines, from the time when I switched the volume-tracking functionality on (in late March this year). I’m not sure which is the best information. I think the hit rate is probably the least useful as I think it includes hits by web-bots and bandwidth hogs, so “visits” and “page views” are more indicative of readership.
All three trendlines show a peak in mid-to-late June. I suspect that’s the impact of the London Korean Festival (my final post on that was 21 June). I saw a falling off after that, but now seem to be steadily rebuilding a business-as-usual readership.
So thank you to my regular readers. Please let me know what you’d like to see more of – or less of. And let me know if you’d like to write some stuff occasionally.
Hits per day
Page views per day
Visits per day