Tuesday 28 August 2012

Another round-up

It has been a while since I last posted something about this blog. The 100th post may well be a suitable occasion for that.

In its third year, the blog is maturing: it seems to have found its audience and their number has been remarkably stable over the last twelve months, with between 1800 and 2200 monthly page views... even during summer.

What are you interested in?

At the bottom of the page, you find the top ranking blog articles. At first the five more popular articles of the month (or rather the preceding 30 days) and below the six most viewed articles. While 30 or 40 page views may occasionally get an article into the monthly ranking, over 700 page views are currently necessary to make it to the absolute top ranking list. The first ranked: Valuation Metrics of Canadian gold and silver miners now totals close to 2,000 page views.
The blog pages (can be clicked on the address bar below the blog header), have taken some time for readers to draw interest. Yet by now, the ‘gold miner pulse’ page would rank on top of all blog articles with over 2,300 page views or over 5% of their total number.
Despite a few new articles added every month, older posts are still read quite often. Several of these could be considered ‘reference articles’, remaining valuable long after posting. Some others refer to a situation or circumstances valid at the time of writing and may not be a good read any longer. Articles in either of the top rankings may get some promotional attention because of that.

Language

This blog started off bilingual English/Dutch and has remained that way. While very few articles in English are translated into Dutch, most of the translation operations seem to be English to different other languages.
Many articles in Dutch refer to quoted Belgian Real Estate investments and as such don’t draw international interest. However, they don’t pass by unnoticed, quite often making it to the monthly ranking. The absolute top ranking contains one (2010) article in Dutch… on a Canadian small cap.

Who are you?

Google enables a geographical breakdown of the page views.
Domestic (Belgian) page views still add up to little over 40% of the total. With close to 60% foreign readers, this blog is quite international. US page views come second with well over 20% of the total number. Third in rank, Canadian readers have leapfrogged the Dutch, both with over 3,000 page views.
German readers come in fifth with around 1,500 page views. While further down the list Russian readers have leapfrogged the British with about 1,300 views. With less than 400 page views, the battle for the places 8 to 10 in the ranking remains open. Australia and France may secure their place with Sweden trying to fence off outsiders.

Browsers and other techno stuff

Google enables a breakdown of the page views by browser and by operating system.
Whereas weekly or daily stats are a near random observation, comparing monthly totals to the aggregated historic totals over nearly three years does provide some idea of the ongoing trends.
Predictably the Microsoft former monopolist Internet Explorer still is the most widely used browser with little over half of the number of page views on this blog. Mozilla Firefox comes in second with nearly a quarter, followed on some distance by Google Chrome and Safari. Opera and browsers for Mobile systems still are a minority.
Monthly statistics consistently point to MS Internet Explorer falling well below 50% of the page views. Mozilla, its main competitor doesn't take any profit from this as its share holds up at best. Runner up is Google Chrome, while Safari and Opera also get to be more popular. Browsers for mobile devices become more popular as a group. I'm not sure to what extent this is a seasonal pattern (as this stats refer to the month of August 2012).

Operating systems
MS Windows based operating systems count for 86% of the page views. Apple's Macintosh is second with 6% followed by Linux and Unix with 2 and 1%. Mobile operating systems have an aggregate share of less than 5% of the page views.
Last month's stats show a decline of Windows based operating systems to 84%, with the total of the operating systems run op PC down to 92%. Among the mobile operating systems the Ipad seems to emerge as the winner with 4% of the page views, or half the total page views coming from mobile devices. A seasonality pattern or the start of a trend, who knows?

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