November site statistics | London Korean Links

Another brief round-up of site traffic, more for my own interest than anything else.

Traffic

The big news of November was the TV slot on YTN, a 24 hour news channel in Korea. I’m guessing that the news story started screening on 20 November, because that’s when my number of visitors jumped from around 500 per day to 600 or 700 a day (see tables at the bottom of this post). After a slight tailing off towards the end of that week, the traffic picked up again when fmrvisitor, a member of UK fan’s forum, posted a link to my site over at naver.com. Thanks again fmrvisitor. And I hope some of my new readers stick around.

I was quite pleased that even without the push of TV publicity, my traffic has been modestly trending upwards until it was averaging about 500 visitors a day (I first breached the 500 milestone on 13 November).

I was on holiday from the end of October to 19 November for 3 weeks. Before going on holiday I’d written 3 weeks worth of posts (sad, dedicated, obsessed or all three?). Fairly dull CD reviews and book reviews – nothing topical – but even so the gradual upwards momentum continued. Total number of unique visitors for November was just 12 short of 7,000. Thanks to all of you for visiting.

Popular searches and articles

The comely Lee Sabi continues to be the most popular google search which results in my site being hit (80 times in November): a full 4 times more than Korea’s official most beautiful actress, Choi Ji-woo. Pororo the little penguin is also about as popular as Choi. K-pop acts and film stars in general dominate the google hits.

It’s difficult to say which are my most popular articles as I’m guessing the statistics are distorted by spammers. I can’t, for example, understand why in November 450 people have read my brief review of Hwang Sok-yong’s The Guest, 30% more than those who were interested in looking at the events calendar. Celebs were the most popular category looked at. So I’ll keep going with an occasional piece of celebrity news to spice things up, but as most of you know that’s not the main purpose of this site.

Referring sites

I hope I haven’t done anything to offend Dion over at Interactive Korean-American TV, but I think he’s dropped his link to my site. I was getting a steady stream from there, but nothing in November. It’s a busy, ever-changing site so it’s no surprise if a link to my humble efforts somehow goes missing.

fmrvisitor’s post at naver.com resulted in 487 new visitors in the last few days (welcome, again). Less noticeable in terms of traffic but nevertheless something I’m pleased about: a wikipedia article on ceramicist Shin Sang-ho is now linking to me. Thank you, whoever did that.

Crazy questions

One of the pleasures of running this site is the occasional email / comment I get asking for help. The one that people are working on right now is the compilation of poetry about Che Guevara. Making good progress on that, thanks to Daeguowl and also, now, Brother Anthony of Taize who very kindly responded to our call for help. Keep the questions coming.

Google ads

I’m now earning 14 cents a day from Google. Wow. That’s a total of $13.21 since I switched on the ads in July. Needless to say, I’m not doing this for the money. I’m still resisting the idea of placing amazon and yesasia links on my site. Who knows, when I get fired from my job for spending too much time on this site (only kidding, boss) I might change my mind.

Comment spam

I have to hand it to the Italians for somehow bypassing the standard WordPress comment spam filter, Akismet. I was receiving rather too many daily mails into my inbox asking me to approve dodgy Italian sex sites, so I implemented a little maths test plugin to control this. Spam has dropped (but some is still getting through) – but some genuine commenters are having trouble leaving useful material, so I’ll have to take a look at implementing a different control. A blogmeister’s job is never done.