Popular posts and search terms
Joining the list of popular search terms such as Super Junior and Rain is an unlikely new celebrity: disgraced curator and art lecturer Shin Jeong-ah. For a while last month my collection of links on her story even overtook anything to do with those 12 or 13 cute K-popsters.
Even more: we all knew that Shin was an unlikely style icon. But there are people out there who see here as a sex symbol as well: there were not a few google searches for “Shin Jeong-ah naked”. Internauts coming here looking for those sorts of photos will be disappointed. But I’m sure there are sites out there equipped with Photoshop which can satisfy all tastes…
So here’s the top 10 search terms which brought people to this site in September:
Super Junior (217)
Shin Jeong-ah (189)
Jumong (165)
Magic Straight Perm (162)
Baek Ji-young (89)
Lee Sabi (85)
Pucca (56)
Han Ye-seul (55)
Lee Young-ae (38)
Lee Hyori (31)
No real surprises there — apart from the absence of Rain. But I wish I had more to say about some of these more popular subjects. I confess though that I’ve never seen Jumong (nor am I likely to, if I haven’t yet watched Sandglass, Winter Sonata or Dae Jang Geum, which top my K-drama priority list); I’m not really a fan of SuJu’s or Baek Ji-young’s music; and I get confused between Han Ye-seul and Kim Tae-hee. One day I might pick up a book about Pucca and see how cute and funky she really is, but I’m not expecting much intellectual stimulation from that. That leaves the Magic Straight Perm, which I’m not about to sample, Shin Jeong-ah, who soon won’t be famous any more, and the three Lees, all of whom I’m very happy to post about, but most of which you’ll be able to read at PopSeoul first.
I’m afraid I shall continue, though, to write about the sort of stuff which really doesn’t get much traffic, because I get a small sense of satisfaction when someone comes across this site having googled a Korean contemporary artist, or following a link from Daum Café to read one of Anna’s interviews with an indie band. Where I can cover material that others don’t, I’ll continue to do so, and when people more qualified than me come along and do a better job, I’ll pack my bags and catch up on the piles of DVDs I haven’t watched.
Revenues
My very first google adsense cheque arrived last week. It’s been over a year since I signed up, but my initial advertising approach was rather too discrete. Since my redesign over the summer there’s been a small acceleration, but it will never be sufficient to cover costs. And I now have taken on a bit of FX exposure: paltry revenues in the ever-declining greenback, with increasing costs soon to be mainly sterling, because…
Webhost
I’ve taken the first steps in moving webhost (again). I’ve got a (reasonably) well-priced Virtual Private Server contract at Demon which should give me all the extra power I need so that I can have all the fancy additional scripts running without being taken offline. But it’s so powerful that the package seems to be designed for people who want to host other users and do webhosting as a business. Which means that instead of the very user-friendly process you have at Bluehost, where the webhost sets up and configures your webspace for you, I now seem to be the webhost. So before I move my blog I’ve got to teach myself to be a webhost, which may take a while. Maybe sometime before the end of the year I might get around to it. I’d much rather be generating content than managing the infrastructure, but you can’t have everything in this world.
Finally, before I move to the boring statistics, here’s Lee Eon-jeong / Lee Sabi, because so many people like to see her.
The trend lines
After a quiet summer, with readership drifting sideways or downwards, all of a sudden on 10 September my traffic went up about 10% according to my WordPress stats. I guess that’s people returning from vacations. Whatever, I think my period of growth is over for a while.
