It's The Economy, Stupid

I got my stats for this blog over 2010  last week.  There is some interesting data.  The blog received 38,472 visits over the year of which there was a bit of an upward trend after I starting writing for the Globe & Mail Economy Lab.  The numbers are down from election years (or the era of the NB Power proposed sale).  I also think the longer term trend towards micro-blogging will hurt sites like mine.  It’s hard to put a chart into 140 characters.  Still, nearly 40,000 over the course of the year doesn’t seem too bad.

I get more visitors from Freddy Beach than anywhere else – 64 percent more than the next nearest source – Moncton.  Despite my twice a week column in the TJ, Saint John is a distant third in blog visitors – at 75 percent fewer visitors compared to Freddy Beach.  Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax pull up the rear.

I got a little kick out of one stat.  The average time spent on the site is around one and a half minutes which I hear is about normal for a site like this but my readers from Waterloo spent an average of more than 4 minutes – well above everywhere else.  I immediately recognized this as Mikel and his long, winding responses to my posts (he is from Waterloo, I believe).  Torontonians are the least impressed – leaving on average after only 55 seconds.

The last interesting stat is the fact that the majority of folks come to the blog directly – either by typing in www.davidwcampbell.com or through their favourites.  Second place is a good search.   An increasing amount of hits come from Twitter but not as much as I would have thought  – only about 1,000.