50,000 visits and counting.....and the Cynic's Rule

Synthetic Daisies has reached another milestone. About a year ago, I posted on reaching the 20,000 visit mark (according to Blogger's analytics engine). In the past year, nearly 30,000 additional visits (and 64 posts) have accumulated, making for 50,000 total visits as of October 19th, 2013. These days, I am averaging about 80-95 visits a day, with occasional days of 200+ visitors. Not bad for blog with 210 posts on fairly high-concept, mostly academic topics.

Here are two pieces of interesting data: one is a graph of visitors for every month of the blog's existence (I didn't do much blogging the first two years), and the other is a table of the Top 8 posts (compare with the Top 10 posts in last year's report).

Two things to note about the table. One, the length of time a post has been around does not correspond to the number of total readers (there are posts from 2009 with fewer than 15 visits). Likewise, some of the most visited posts are from earlier this year. Second, word length also does not correspond with the number of visits (something I was curious about). Perhaps novelty, timeliness, and being associated with an existing social network (e.g. CoE) are key. Or perhaps the Cynic's Rule of social media popularity plays a role. Check back on this in another year.