In the early years of this website, I was rather obsessed with readership statistics. It was gratifying to see the readership grow, and it was informative to see what it was they were visiting the site for. After a while, I found that nothing much was changing. And I realised that if I were to devote myself to writing what many visitors wanted I would soon get very bored. So I stopped paying attention to them, and focused on what I myself wanted to do. So this is the first statistics post for over seven years.
As mentioned elsewhere, this site was originally expected to be pretty static, but in the 10 years that we’ve been online there have been:
- 4,939 posts in total, including 308 guest posts.
What have we written about?
- 1,698 event notices (can’t believe it’s that many, but the computer doesn’t lie).
Those posts are usually easy and quick to write.
What else? Well, we went to a lot of those events, and wrote about some of them:
- 549 event write-ups including:
- 71 concert reviews
- 223 exhibition reviews and
- 105 write-ups of lectures, conferences, Q&As and discussions
Coming very soon, a special post highlighting the top events of LKL’s first 10 years.
There are some articles which don’t require you to go out and about…
- 159 book reviews
- 169 film reviews, and even
- 64 album reviews
…and some which definitely require you to be on the road (though they also require a lot of desktop research back at the ranch):
In total, 2,174,956 words (of course, not all of them are original – for example, events posts tend to be mainly copies of press releases)
What have people read? Well, sadly it’s the posts which require the least brainpower, and which gave the least satisfaction to write. High on the list of most-read posts is a listing of Korean food stores taken from a leaflet, and a cut & paste job about the magic straight perm. In the early years I was as fascinated by the world of celebrities as many others, and photos of Rain, Super Junior and Jeon Ji-hyun generated lots of traffic. I’ll probably prune those posts from the site in due course as they are nothing to do with what this site is about. Nowadays the web is so saturated with celebrity coverage that no-one comes here for that sort of thing any more.
No, the best posts don’t get the most traffic, but traffic isn’t why we’re here. It was nice when someone digged my review of the best books of 2015 as suddenly my traffic went through the roof. But that’s the exception. And I suspect it’ll be another 10 years before I do another review of statistics.