As I wrote last year, it’s getting a lot harder to compile these yearly statistics columns; social media platforms like WordPress just can’t seem to leave well enough alone, and they’ve steadily made it more difficult to write and edit my posts (much less find out the kind of statistics I used to be able to find with a single click). As the new year dawned they even made it extremely difficult to get to the site’s dashboard; luckily I remembered the URL and was able to create a link myself in Chrome. Furthermore, Google continues to censor search results so as to curtail traffic to “adult” blogs like this one; while I used to get a huge number of serendipitous hits, my site is now found almost entirely by people specifically looking for it or following direct links. Furthermore, I fear the statistics themselves are less meaningful than they used to be; the tallies for some are so small that they don’t seem likely to represent more than a fraction of the actual figures for those categories. Perhaps WordPress simply hasn’t kept up with the way people access websites, but if we believe these figures nearly everyone who comes here now does so by typing the address in, which seems unlikely. So unless things change dramatically in the next year, this may well be the last annual statistics column I do.
I received a total of 918,225 visitors in 2014, about 83,000 less than in the previous year; the average number of hits per day was 2515. My best month was September, with a total of 84,336 views (2811 per day); as you can see the performance is still very consistent, with the high not all that far above the average. The record for best single day is still held by October 6th, 2013 (9253 views). As usual, Twitter gave me the greatest number of referrals, 59,547 in all; it was followed by Reddit (11,775 hits) and Facebook (5501). #4 was a (presumably collective) heading labeled “Android apps” with 4259, #5 Vice with 2643, #6 Pinterest with 2144, #7 USA Sex Guide with 2025, #8 Bustle with 1949, #9 Jeff Pearlman’s site with 915, and #10 Reason with 877. The top ten countries in which my readers live together account for about 87% of all of my traffic; #1 is the United States with 575,464 hits (62.7%); #2 the United Kingdom with 66,273 (7.2%); #3 Canada with 53,220 (5.8%); #4 Australia with 38,161 (4.16%); #5 India with 13,757 (1.50%); #6 Germany with 12,479 (1.36%); #7 Japan with 10,218 (1.11%); #8 The Netherlands with 9045 (0.99%); #9 France with 8921 (0.97%); and #10 Singapore with 8505 (0.93%).
When counting searches, I only included those with 5 hits or more (otherwise it would’ve taken all night). The most common search which discovered this blog last year was the perennial favorite “soapland” (in many, many different forms) for a total of 815 hits. “Sonagachi” was second with 552; many of these seemed to think they could find a rate table, as though there were such a thing. “Maggie McNeill” (spelled several different ways and with added terms such as “nude” or “boobs”) was third with 477, and “honest courtesan” (in various permutations) was fourth with 369 hits (followed closely by “Veronica Franco” in fifth with 362). Inquiries about genital sizes & shapes came in sixth with 346, and various permutations of “anonymous blogging” seventh with 283. “P411” was eighth with 213 hits, inquiries about sex workers’ rates were ninth with 176, and “Lillie Langtry” was tenth with 119 (kicking out “rhinoceros” for the first time; it only scored 105). Note that numbers for all of these continue to drop due to Google’s continuing prudification of its search parameters.
My top ten posts for the year were as follows:
Name Date # of hits in 2016
All Shapes and Sizes September 8th, 2010 48,108
A Visit to Soapland October 21st, 2011 44,143
Black Men September 18th, 2010 24,793
Advice for Clients August 21st, 2010 22,878
A Whore in the Bedroom September 9th, 2010 20,843
Something in the Milk January 28th, 2014 15,584
More Terminology September 7th, 2011 14,121
The Going Rate October 9th, 2010 13,825
Honolulu Harlots July 5th, 2011 10,573
Veronica Franco November 14th, 2011 9679
Dr. Brooke Magnanti’s “How To Blog Anonymously (and how not to)” also had considerable traffic (37,482 hits in all); the reason it doesn’t appear in the table above is that it’s a static page rather than a post (I exclude my “Introduction” page for the same reason). Unfortunately, it’s no longer possible to easily track comments per post, so I’ve had to drop that metric from the roundup. You’ll also note the top posts have only barely changed; predictably, the demise of Ashley Madison has caused my column on it to lose readership, making way for Veronica Franco to break into the top ten. But other than that it’s boringly similar to last year, which is another reason, I think, for dispensing with this feature in the future. Ah, well; all things must pass. After seven years and so many other changes, this one is really quite minor.
