Ben Best's Blog

My website has become decreasingly popular, which has decreased my interest from what it was when I could see it growing. 2011 saw a significant decline in sessions on my website compared to previous years, with Urchin reporting:

2007: 1,548,099

# posted by Ben Best @ 7:49 PM 0 comments

Last year I believed that traffic on my website had peaked in 2007. But 2010 exceeded the previous few years in number of unique sessions, according to Urchin:

2007: 1,548,099

2008: 1,505,117

2009: 1,483,335

2010: 1,744,189

The pattern of website hits climbing gradually from August to December was not repeated in 2010, as distinct from the previous few years. In 2010 peak activity was in October:

______2009_______2010

Sept__122,079____145,345

Oct___145,846____159,538

Nov___148,209____153,481

Dec___155,701____143,629

In December 2010 my website had a 3-month average world ranking of about 300,000, compared to about 230,000 in December 2009, and about 170,000 in December 2008. In December 2010 my USA 3-month average ranking was about 130,000 compared to about 90,000 in December 2009. But on October 17, 2010 my USA ranking was about 73,000.

My The History of Christmas page was responsible for increasing my late Fall hits considerably in the past, but was less influential in 2010. Googling "history of Christmas", "the history of Christmas", and "Christmas history" still shows my webpage on the first page of Google, but the ranking is not as high. In 2009 my The History of Christmas page peaked at 1,312 hits on December 15, but in 2010 it peaked at 1,110 hits on December 24. Possibly there was enough of an increase in home computers in 2010 to make home sources exceed school sources for the first time.

Around March 2010 I began tracking pages on my website with Google Analytics as well as with Urchin. A visual inspection of visits to my website on Google Analytics in the Fall of 2010 indicates a series of "hills", where each "hill" corresponds to hits over 4,000 daily on weekends and under 4,000 on weekends (especially Saturdays, less drop on Fridays and Sundays). The general trend is upward to mid-October and fairly level (though slightly downward) to mid-December. The peak in October was Monday, October 18 with 5,225 hits (not an extreme variance from the following days). The second half of December was mostly below 3,000 hits per day, with the exception of Monday, December 27, which had 7,934 hits. For December 27, 5,865 of those hits were to the single webpage Is Longevity Entirely Hereditary? , which according to Urchin were nearly all from the bing.com search engine. There was no special spike from google.com searches on that day. Usually, a "one-day wonder" for one of my webpages is the result of some blog or newspaper article mentioning the page, so it is mysterious to me that a "one-day wonder" for a webpage would come from a particular search engine.

Google Analytics recorded about a million visitors to my website in the last ten months of 2010 from 222 countries. The only countries obviously missing were North Korea, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, French Guiana, and some African countries. On a percentage basis, my source of visits was:

United States 60.8%

Canada 7.8%

United Kingdom 7.1%

Australia 4.2%

India 3.9%

Philippines 2.3%

Germany 1.3%

Malaysia 1.1%

Singapore 0.8%

New Zealand 0.7%

According to Google Analytics, the average time spent on one of the pages of my website was 41 seconds. But 13,785 pages were listed. I only have about 190 pages on my website, so the count must be including every graphic, of which there are many (but not that many). Time spent on the more popular pages, however, is more in the range of 3 to 6 minutes. Below are the percent popularities and time spent on my most popular pages according to Google Analytics. I have converted number of unique pageviews into percentages based on an estimation of one million visitors in the last ten months of 2010. This means 197,724 unique page views become 20% of total visits. (You have
to look WAY DOWN in this silly Blogger)

Webpage Percent and Time Spent

Webpage	Percent	Min:Sec
Causes of Death	20%	4:51
Brain Neurotransmitters	13%	4:59
Death by Murder	13%	5:01
The History of Christmas	3%	4:56
The Uses of Financial Statements	3%	5:26
Brain Areas Supporting Cerebral Cortex Function	3%	2:39
Figuring the Odds (Probability Puzzles)	2%	8:52
Mechanisms of Aging	2%	4:20
Basic Cerebral Cortex Function Other than Vision	2%	1:52
The Amygdala and the Emotions	2%	3:51
Melatonin	2%	4:35
Is Caffeine a Health Hazard?	2%	3:59
Fats You Need — Essential Fatty Acids	2%	3:54
Does Excess Protein Cause Kidney Damage?	2%	5:00
Alcohol — Health Benefit or Hazard?	2%	4:22
N-AcetylCysteine (NAC)	2%	3:56
Phytochemicals as Nutraceuticals	1%	2:43
Lessons for Cryonics from Metallurgy and Ceramics	1%	3:01
Perfusion & Diffusion in Cryonics Protocol	1%	1:49

# posted by Ben Best @ 6:34 AM 0 comments

Traffic on my website peaked in 2007 with 1,548,099 unique sessions, declining slightly in 2008 to 1,505,117 and then to 1,483,335 in 2009. I attribute this to competition from Wikipedia. My use of unsophisticated HTML and the "old fashioned" appearance of my website may also be a factor. I am mainly interested in content rather than form, and I have not bothered to learn how to produce better-looking form.

According to ALEXA.COM on December 31, 2008 the 3-month average world-wide ranking for BENBEST.COM was 170,071, but only got to as high as 237,651 in December 2009. Three month ranking in the United States peaked at 90,096 on Christmas Eve. At the end of December, BENBEST.COM was receiving 1.3 ten-thousandths of one percent of website hits in the world.

Alexa.com is now giving demographic information on the sources of sessions. The overwhelming largest source of sessions to BENBEST.COM is school browsers. That makes sense of the fact that that largest education category of my users is "some college" and the second largest age category is 18-24. But it does not explain why the largest represented age group is 45-54 and why female visitors are over-represented, whereas male visitors are under-represented. Although I can understand how Alexa can distinguish school browsers from home and work browsers, I am skeptical that it can determine gender or age group with accuracy.

As usual, October (145,846), November (148,709), and December 155,688) — in that order — were the months with the highest session counts in 2009. As usual, there were about twice as many sessions in the first half of December as in the second half. Most of the year, Causes of Death is the most popular page on my website. The History of Christmas averages 30-40 hits per day during most of the year, but on December 14 this year it peaked at 1,312 hits. Every year, Death by Murder becomes the most popular page on my website between Christmas and New Year's, peaking just before New Year's and never the most popular during the rest of the year.

Here are my comparisons of the PageViews I got in December 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 for some of my favorite pages:

The decline of many of my long established pages is offset
by the rise of other pages. In December 2009

Causes of Death got 19,675 hits,

Death by Murder got 16,387 hits,

Brain Neurotransmitters got 12,093 hits, and

Perfusion & Diffusion in Cryonics Protocol got 5,054 hits

# posted by Ben Best @ 8:32 PM 0 comments

Traffic on my website seems to be declining
slightly. In 2008 there were 1,505,117 unique
sessions as opposed to 1,548,099 unique sessions
in 2007, 1,491,845 in 2006, and 1,252,175 in 2005.
Pageviews were 2,127,350 in 2008 as opposed to
2,137,172 pageviews in 2007, 2,197,133
in 2006 and 1,668,890 in 2005. In seeming
contraction to these stats, according
to the traffic rankings at

ALEXA.COM on December 31, 2008 the
3-month average world-wide ranking for

BENBEST.COM
was 170,071, which was more than three times as high as

Alcor Life Extension Foundation (565,401) and more
than six times as high as the

Cryonics Institute (1,116,857). My highest country ranking by Alexis.com
was in Sri Lanka, for some reason: 12,592 followed by the
Philippines: 42,097. My rankings in the United States,
Canada, China and the United Kingdom were 80,264, 101,348,
121,743 and 180,585 respectively. Overall, 45.8% of my
traffic came from the United States and 9.8% came from China

Below are some tables that summarize comparative
statistics for my website in the last few of years.
All of the data may be understated because I have heard
that some ISPs like AOL do caching of websites, so I would
not record many AOL hits (actually I never see AOL as a
source in my statistics).

Here are my comparisons of the PageViews I got in December
2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 for some of my favorite pages (you have
to look WAY DOWN in this silly Blogger):

December PageViews Webpage 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 The History of Christmas 20,179 44,446 39,842 27,477 15,642 Mechanisms of Aging 1,850 4,105 6,392 7,873 3,603 Alcohol -- Health Benefit or Hazard? 1,142 2,943 2,829 2,408 2,002 Cryonics -- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 670 973 1,311 1,105 1,520 Vitrification in Cryonics 511 772 1,110 959 1,133 Say's Law and Economic Growth 482 568 619 651 806 An Austrian Theory of Business Cycles 329 471 634 651 1,245 Schemers in the Web 243 416 767 462 506

The decline of many of my long established pages is offset
by the rise of other pages.
Causes of Death at 13,346 in 2008 has been a very popular staple on
my website for a long time.

Brain Neurotransmitters at 10,527,

Diffusion and Perfusion in Cryonics Protocol at 4,092 and

Cancer Death at 3,714 were very popular in 2008.

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the most popular page on my website year-round is generallyCauses of Death. The second most popular page on my website is usually
Death by Murder (although Brain Neurotransmitters sometimes is second). But I have noticed that during the period between Christmas and early January, Death by Murder will be the most popular page. My speculation about why this happens is that people browsing the web during that period are mostly looking for entertainment, whereas during the rest of the year there are more people doing research.

The search phrases now distinguish between "history of christmas" (1,805) and
"the history of christmas" (1,709) which may have affected the "history of
christmas" statistic. A couple of other popular terms/phrases in 2008
were "glutamate" (1,162) and "amygdala function" (374).

# posted by Ben Best @ 6:11 PM 0 comments