Zurich - 25,000 Page Views

Zurich Festival Lake View - Now My Own Celebration!

I wrote a blog on my blog statistics when I reached 10,000 page views; now that I’ve reached over 25.000 it seems like time for an update.

Before I begin, I’ll just put the provisos that I wrote before – namely, I don’t really trust the statistics and even google says they are not to be expected to be accurate. I think the numbers change over time as hits by bots are deleted from the totals. In any case, the stats across various ways of counting (by country, by day, etc) don’t add up. Still, it’s fun to look. Also, I believe that those who receive my blog by email (and I don’t get to see how many subscribe by email, which is a shame, but could also be depressing if I had a sudden exodus) are not included in the totals.

What’s been most noticeable just looking at it casually each week as I update my blog was a sudden increase in (alleged) readers from Germany. Having not featured previously as a prominent country at 10,000 views, this time it’s at the top of my readership. Not only that, there are almost twice as many German readers as any other country. I can’t really understand why this should be, and the hits are so many, I am frankly suspicious that there’s some mega-bot in Germany that’s managed to foil Google’s bot-detector. Huge apologies if there are lots of you reading my blog in Germany – I’m very flattered if it is true and do keep reading! I’m just a bit stunned.

After Germany, there’s the UK and Switzerland, numbers of readers halving each time, and then the totals start to level out as Russia comes fourth, quite close in numbers to Switzerland. Egypt slips in at 9th.

To my surprise, it’s more recent posts in 2018 and 2019 that have been read more than the earlier posts (which have been up longer and therefore had more chance of being read). I’m not sure why this is and I can only think it is tied in with the sudden influx of readers from Germany.

There are only 41 extra hits between the most-read post (El Andalous – Dangers of Swimming (4th Feb 2019)) and the 10th most-read (El Andalous – My Mohammed is Different (10th Dec, 2018)). In fact, three of the most-read blogs have the word “swimming” in the title (Zurich – End of Swimming Lessons and El Andalous – Swimming Frustrations were the other two); ‘swimming’ doesn’t appear as a search term, though. I’m quite pleased that these blogs seem to be relatively popular because sometimes I wonder if this is more of a swimming blog than anything else, but at least my obsession doesn’t seem to stop people from reading.

Two of the most-read blogs were about my holidays (Colonia San Jordi and St Petersburg); again, I could quite happily think that these were more popular due to searches on the internet by those seeking holidays in these destinations but, again, these did not feature as search terms leading to the blog (in fact, no search terms other than the obvious [eg, “searching the dream”] were listed).

I don’t think there’s been much change in browsers used (Chrome is the most popular with 55%, followed by Safari (18%), Internet Explorer (15%), and FireFox (6%)). Similarly, operating systems used were predominantly Windows (71%), IPhone (11%), Macintosh (7%), and iPad (4%). Personally, I’m pleased to see that Chrome and Windows feature highly as it might encourage sports watch manufacturers to continue making platforms that can be used via a laptop rather than just via a mobile phone (which seems to be an increasing trend).

So, that’s how things stand as of 25,000 page views. Thank you everyone for reading.