2013 By the Numbers: Blogging

I‘ve been tracking quite a few areas of “personal analytics” for well over a year and so I have a fairly complete data set for some parts of my life in 2013. Here are some of the numbers for folks who like following along with this type of stuff. Keep in mind that there are still roughly 12 hours in the year for more data to accumulate, but I think it is safe to say that it won’t alter these totals by much.

Rather than combining all of this in one long post, I plan on doing a post for each of 6 areas:

1. Blogging (this post!)
2. Writing and publishing
3. Activity and sleeping
4. Reading
5. Driving
6. Email and social networking

I begin with blogging.

This blog has over 830,000 page views in 2013, more than double from last year’s total, although the comparison is slightly skewed. Last year, I mostly relied on WordPress’s stats package, while this year, I switched entirely over to Google Analytics for its richer feature set. The WordPress packaged seemed to have a higher count by 10% or so, but I’m declaring Google Analytics numbers official. So 830,000 page views it is.

The year started off strong, with both January and February seeing over 100,000 visits per month. For a while, I thought I might crack 1 million page views, but things slowed down a bit, averaging between 60,000 – 70,000 page view a month for most of the rest of the year. This month, things jumped again, and I’ll finish December with just about 90,000 page views.

Page views are different from visits. I visit is a complete session and can contain multiple page views by the same visitor. If you want to look at things from the visit perspective, I had just about half a million distinct visits in 2013. Do that math and that makes for 1.8 page views per visit.

This was a strange year for RSS, which Google retiring Reader. I have roughly 2,000 subscribers to the RSS feed for the blog, according to Feedburner. And according to Feedly, I have nearly 800 readers in that application. This adds another 150,000 or so page views, which I suppose gets me to my 1 million mark, but in truth, I’m looking to hit that milestone directly through my Google Analytics. So I’m sticking with the 830,000 page views for now.

I wrote 488 blog posts in 2013. I don’t have a total word count, but I can give a rough estimate, since I started tracking this explicitly in February. It comes to about 260,000 words, and this is completely independent of my fiction and nonfiction writing. Here is what the month-by-month breakdown looks like, beginning in February:

That about covers blogging. In the next post in the series, I’ll have some numbers for my fiction and nonfiction writing for 2013.