State of the Blog Report: 2016

• GeekFluent
• 7 years ago

New Year’s Day. Today we find ourselves breathing a sigh of relief that we actually made it through the year that was 2016. It’s also a time to look forward with a mixture of hope and dread at the year that will be 2017.

This post focuses on looking back at how GeekFluent did during 2016.

With a total of 36,720 views, 2016 was the blog’s second-biggest year, coming in at 99.5% of 2014’s total of 36,900 views. A more detailed look follows below.

Top Ten Most-Read Posts of 2016

Here are the most-read GeekFluent posts in 2016. I’m only including actual views of posts here; if included, views of the blog’s main page would have ranked second at 3,142.

1. (4,883) Cisco Enters Hyperconverged Market with HyperFlex
2. (2,611) Magic Balloon: A Whiteboarding Creativity Game/Exercise
3. (1,970) Use Your Windows Laptop as an Isilon Console Terminal
4. (1,326) What’s New in Isilon OneFS 8.0
5. (1,192) EMC Announces Next-Generation VMAX Storage Array
6. (1,160) What Will VAAI v2 Do for You? Part 2 of 2: NFS
7. (1,117) EMC Announces New Mid-Range Unified Storage Platform – Unity
8. (1,018) What’s New in VMware vSphere 6.5
9. (978) Pure Storage Announces New Solutions and New Architecture
10. (666) How I Accidentally Became a Conference Keynote Guest Speaker

Looking over the list, things that stand out to me are:

• Some of my content has some staying power. Four of the Top Ten posts were written before 2016. The VMAX post was from 2014, Magic Balloon and the Isilon Console Terminal posts were from 2013, and I wrote my VAAI v2 posts back in 2012.
• Seven of the top ten posts are related to product announcements.
• #1 had 1.9X as many views as #2 and 7.3X as many as #10.

Top Ten GeekFluent Posts Written During 2016

Here are the most-read posts in 2016 that were actually written during 2016, listed with the month in which they were published.

1. (4,883) Cisco Enters Hyperconverged Market with HyperFlex (March)
2. (1,326) What’s New in Isilon OneFS 8.0 (February)
3. (1,117) EMC Announces New Mid-Range Unified Storage Platform – Unity (May)
4. (1,018) What’s New in VMware vSphere 6.5 (November)
5. (978) Pure Storage Announces New Solutions and New Architecture (March)
6. (666) How I Accidentally Became a Conference Keynote Guest Speaker (March)
7. (452) SimpliVity Announces OmniStack 3.5 and OmniView (April)
8. (339) Qumulo Adds Erasure Coding, Predictive Analytics, and Three New Hardware Models (April)
9. (302) Cisco Announces New Storage Building Blocks — UCS S3260 (November)
10. (278) For Vendors: Handling Negative Social Media Feedback — Three Case Studies and Some Tips (March)

Things that stand out to me here:

• Eight of the ten are related to vendor product announcements.
• Two of the ten were published in November and still got more views than other posts that had 10 more months to collect them.
• #1 had 3.7X more views than #2 and 17.5X more than #10.

Referrers — Top Ten Ways Folks Found GeekFluent in 2016

A “referrer” is the URL someone was viewing when they clicked a link that brought them to my site. Here’s how folks found me in 2016:

1. (19,968) Search Engines
   1. (18,658) Google
   2. (570) Google Image Search
   3. (439) Bing
   4. (188) Yahoo!
   5. (78) DuckDuckGo
   6. (10) Baidu
   7. (single digits) everything else
2. (1514) Twitter
3. (1,089) LinkedIn
4. (165) Google+
5. (135) The Google Android app
6. (122) penguinpunk.net
7. (113) packetpushers.net
8. (97) Facebook
9. (96) techfieldday.com
10. (90) vmwareblogs.com

Things that stand out for me are:

• More than half my views don’t come from my “regulars”, but are from folks who searched a particular phrase of topic.
• People are still using Bing and Yahoo in far greater numbers than I’d have guessed. (3 views came from AOL…)
• Some folks are reading GeekFluent from China. (Baidu is China’s state-filtered search engine.)
• Social media works — many views came in from SocMed services.
• More blogs and sites are linking to my posts — there’s been a clear uptick in traffic referred by other sites.

Where GeekFluent Readers are From

In 2016, folks viewed this blog from 154 different countries on six continents. (Including one view from Vatican City! Maybe the Pope is a fan…) Here are the top ten countries from which folks are reading GeekFluent:

1. (19,906) United States
2. (1,652) United Kingdom
3. (1,560) India
4. (1,159) Germany
5. (963) Canada
6. (949) Australia
7. (947) France
8. (804) Japan
9. (503) European Union
10. (471) Netherlands

In 2017, I just need one view from Antarctica to get all seven continents. If you’re headed there anyway, do me a solid?

In Conclusion

The numbers show me several ways I’ve been doing well and improving, so I need to keep doing more of that kind of stuff.

They also show me there’s still lots of room for improvement. I’ll take a look at the GeekFluent plans for 2017 in a separate post.