Saturday, January 31, 2009

State of the Blog 2009

Well my second year as a blogger is in the books. The stats for the year are below, with the numbers from my first year in parenthesis for comparison.

Posts: 84 (80)
Posts about beer 53 (53)

Total Visits: 39,861 - 109/day (11,712 - 32/day)
108 was the highest single traffic day for the blog in its first year, to have that my average for the second year beat that is pretty excellent. The numbers are still climbing thanks to all of you who have posted links and told your friends about the blog. This January I already have nearly 5,000 hits, that is almost double what I had in the lowest month (July), when Google decided to rank me below an aggregator feed of my own site.

Page Views: 71,630 (22,435)
Unique Visitors: 21,219 (6,110)

Direct Traffic: 9,042 (2,908)
Search Engines: 16,030 (3,373) - The biggest percentage gain by far.
Referring sites: 14,779 (5,431)

Top Referring Sites:
1st Northern Brewer (1st)
2nd Beer Advocate (2nd)
3rd Basic Brewing Radio (3rd)

People from 109 (68) countries visited.
1st USA (1st)
2nd Canada (2nd)
3rd UK (4th)
4th Australia (3rd)
5th Denmark (7th)
6th Sweden (6th)
7th New Zealand (5th)
8th Italy (17th)
9th Norway (8th)
10th Germany (13th)

What is with Italy a nation of wine drinkers beating out the beer loving Germans? Could it be the cheese and bread posts? Or is the Italian craft beer revolution I keep hearing about finally taking hold?

About 82% (85%) of the visitors were from America.
1st California (1st)
2nd Pennsylvania (3rd)
3rd New York (6th)
4th Illinois (7th)
5th Virginia (4th)
6th Texas (13th)
7th Massachusetts (10th)
8th Minnesota (5th)
9th DC (2nd) - I guess I'm not reading my own posts as much as I used to.
10th Washington (12th)

It is not surprising that a lot of those states have strong craft brewing and homebrewing scenes (and big populations). In case you were wondering I got the fewest hits from Wyoming (14).

In the browser wars Internet Explorer lost ground this year 36% (40%), and Firefox stayed in the same place at 49%.

Operating System:
76% Windows (79%)
19% Mac (17%)
4% Linux (5%)
.5% iPhone (.05%)

Besides the main page, the most viewed articles have gone to the Beer label, my no-knead sourdough recipe (thanks to a link on the Bread Feed), and my Berliner Weiss recipe.

In July I signed up for Feedburner to track the number of people who subscribe to my feed. It has grown from 100 at the time to more than 250 today. The total number of feed views was 65,441 (a good deal of that comes from the Beerinator beer blog aggregator).

Things on tap for this year:
Thursday book reviews
Big Funky Ale (Just bottled)
Lambic Mrk 2 and Pluot Flanders Pale (Bottling next summer)
Group Wine Barrel Flanders Red (Probably bottling in the fall)
Group Bourbon Barrel Wee Heavy (followed another clean beer then something funky)
Plenty of other interesting fermentation experiments (variants of my no-knead sourdough, more cheese, cured meat, and oddities).

As always, if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, complaints (or sponsorship offers) please email me at [email protected]

3 comments:

Jason Lyle said...

Congrats, Mike! Cheers to an even better third year.

Dave said...

Grats on finishing 2 years of beer blogging. Seeing how you live near DC, are you planning to go to SAVOR this year? It's the biggest beer and food pairing event in the nation. Wish it was closer to Colorado so I could go to that. Perhaps some year soon I'll be able to attend.

Surprised I didn't see Colorado as a top visiting state to your blog. We certainly have a ton of beer out here. Keep up the good work on blogging! Cheers.

The Mad Fermentationist (Mike) said...

Thanks.

I am planning on going to Savor this year. I decided not to go last year because of the high price (close to $100), but people I talked to had such a good time that I decided I had to go this year.

Hard for you to complain too much with the GABF and so many fantastic local breweries.