Ben Best's Blog

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