First, some boring stuff
December was a record month for advertising revenue: the princely sum of $11.17, making my life-to-date total $24.32. But if it stays at December’s levels I’ll be happy: that more than pays for webhosting.
And something I get lots of, and wish I got less: my life-to-date spam comment count (as of the time of writing) is a staggering 34,000
Now this
For those not hunting for celebrity news, or details of bookshops or restaurants in London, a very popular generator of traffic in 2006 was Chejudo Love Land theme park (100 visits to my site). The most work-safe image is above (credit: Matthias Streitz at Der Spiegl). There are links to less work-safe images in my original post here.
Less popular (46 visits) was the seemingly innocuous search phrase “North Korean Army Marching”. Scroll down to the bottom of this post to see why people should be googling that particular phrase.
Other topics
One thing I’m reasonably pleased about, though it’s very small beer at the moment, is that people are coming to this site to read about artists. Most popular artist is Lee Dong-wook: at 40 visits he’s as popular as Kangta (29) and Yonsama (11) put together – though it seems there’s also a person on TV by that name as well so maybe people are looking for the latter person. Next on the list is Choi Jong-hwa (12) and Lee Hyung-koo (11). If that means people are visiting this site as a result of its coverage of the visual arts, that’s great.
London Koreatown
One of the biggest generators of traffic to this site is questions about things Korean in London. What’s the best restaurant? Where can I buy soju or get a haircut? Where are the Korean churches and what are the newspapers? Where can I learn Korean? Tell me about the Anglo-Korean Society, the Cultural Centre or any other organisations (a lesson here: if you’re a twenty-first century organisation, you need to be on the web).
And if people are looking for money-making opportunities, it looks like there could be a market (albeit a small one) for a Noraebang and a Korean tea-shop in London / New Malden. I know some of the restaurants in town (Young Bin Kwan and Kaya spring to mind) have karaoke machines. Does anyone know of any others, or of a proper noraebang? I don’t know anywhere to buy decent ($50 a packet) Korean tea myself other than Korea, but then I haven’t explored in New Malden yet.
People also came to my site looking for Korean cooking lessons (many specifically wanting to know how to prepare sea squirt) and Korean dating agencies. And went empty away.
Business coverage
I’m glad that some of my business coverage seems to be read. One topic I have been following is the alleged opening of the Korean legal services market. As the only other site to be covering this seems to be the UK Law Society, I’ve had 70 visitors to my site to find out about this. People have even been moderately interested in my brief coverage of Credit Suisse’s unfortunate debacle in Korean reverse convertibles. De gustibus, and all that.
Films
I tend to steer clear of film reviews and the like as Darcy, Jase and others cover those more than adequately. But on the rare occasions when I have something to say, people seem to be interested. 115 visits for the Host, but the star article seems to be Pororo the little penguin. Only 91 visits, but I was expecting zero interest.
Conclusions
All of which leads me to conclude: well, I’m gonna continue to write about whatever takes my fancy. But maybe I should make this site the home of the official UK Lee Sabi / Lee Eon-jeong / Lee Un-jung / ì´ì–¸ì • Fan Club just to make sure. Then I could post photos like this every day.
And finally, before I get to that priceless photo…
Those traffic statistics updated to December:
Daily visits to December
Daily page views to December
Daily hits to December
And here it is. Hurrah!
Apologies to those who saw an imcomplete earlier version of this post on Monday. Slight glitch on the button-pushing front when I was distracted by snails-pace server response times.