Ben Best's Blog

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