Blog stats 2014

Two blog stats to be pleased about were achieved in 2014 - first, I passed 30,000 page views overall and, second, I achieved a record 14,800 page views during the year.

I also achieved my highest ever monthly total of 2,800 views during June when I posted a piece about the TT. I thought it was quite a well-argued piece about rider deaths. A reference was posted on the official TT blog and it took off from there. I did get quite a lot of abuse, but only from people who were clearly stupid, trolls or who hadn’t read it.

In any event TT enthusiasts are hardly radical islamists - they won’t storm your house and shoot you, just post insulting comments on your blog, which you can delete or leave as a badge of honour.

I also wrote a piece about Michael Dunlop perhaps being the best TT rider of all time and this did quite well too.

My most popular piece to date is a blog I did back in 2012 about Ian Hutchinson, the Yorkshire racer who won five TT races in one week at the 2010 TT, but then suffered a serious leg injury in a race at Silverstone towards the end of the British Supersport Championship. Two years later, he was still receiving treatment and was clearly at something of a low point. I copied a number of his tweets and told the story of his suffering through those tweets and responses from friends and fellow riders. To date, it’s had 3,000 page views.

Non-biking blog subjects are more slow burn. This year, I very much enjoyed writing about our travels in Ecuador and one of those blogs - about the Devil’s Cauldron - regularly gets lots of views from the US. I think people planning trips to Ecuador search Baños and come across my piece.

I was on target to beat the 2013 monthly totals each month until something happened in November and I got a sudden dip. However, December bounced back with a massive total.

	2011	2012	2013	2014
January		118	854	1038
February		342	538	1133
March		251	752	1191
April		208	844	975
May		348	855	1136
June		309	1,829	2756
July		324	691	1330
August		234	565	1135
September		384	814	1016
October		518	875	1107
November	117	1,671	1,066	688
December	69	551	662	1295
Annual total	186	5,258	10,345	14,800

November was a bad month for me - worse than 2012 and 2013, but every other
month saw my blog achieve record page views.