Statistics

I always enjoy watching the statistics that Google makes available to me to track my reader base.  It's quite interesting.  I have just hit 75,000 total page views.  I think that's awesome.  In fact, that's more than I ever expected to get in my life when I first started my blog.

The highest single post has consistently been (since the time I posted it) the one where I came out of the closet, entitled Yes, I'm Gay, with just over 700 views.  The second and third were until just recently the posts entitled The Engagement and Puppy Love, wherein I detail how Conrad and I met and got engaged and what falling in love feels like, each with approximately half as many views as "Yes, I'm Gay".  However, in recent months my post entitled Boycott List, wherein I make fun of people who wanted to boycott Oreo for being pro-gay, passed those two up and is now in second place with just over 400 hits.  (It's exciting to me to watch these things happen, so I'm making it sound like a horse race.)

My single biggest source of traffic is Facebook, with over 3,000 referrals.  Second is the Moho Directory, a list of blogs maintained by homosexuals who are either currently or were in the past members of the LDS church.

The search terms are also fun to watch.  One of the most popular ones that's kind of surprising to me is "jesus and angel at car accident" or slight variations of that phrase.

As is to be expected, nearly all of my traffic is from the USA.  Of the 75,000 hits, 70,000 of them are from the USA.  What surprises me is all the other countries around the world with people who read my blog.  In order, the top ten are

1. USA - 70,000
2. Canada - 800
3. UK - 500
4. India - 300
5. Japan - 240
6. Australia - 230
7. Germany - 230
8. Russia - 200
9. Philippines - 130
10. Belgium - 100

I'm actually shocked that I have 100 hits from Belgium and the Philippines.  I don't know who's reading my blog in Russia, but it's really cool to know that over 200 page views are from there.  And this month I've got 22 views from Nigeria, 11 from Pakistan, 8 from Malaysia.  It's so cool to see all this diversity.  I'm actually quite flattered that people all over the globe are reading what I write.  

One last thing that I find quite surprising is that 54% of my readers use Google Chrome.  That's crazy.  I mean, I use it because I think it's the best browser, but it's a fairly new browser and I didn't think that it was that widely used yet.  I'm glad to see Internet Explorer third on the list, after Firefox, with 12% of the views.  Interestingly, if you combine Safari with Mobile Safari (rather than counting them separately as Google does), it then pushed IE down to 4th place.  That makes me really happy.  

Anyway, there're some random stats for you that you probably don't care about, but I think it's cool to watch and so I'm sharing it.  And if you're from a country other than the USA feel free to mention in the comments where you're hailing from (and how you found out about my blog) if you would like to.