Tag Archives: meta

The 2018 Many Words Press Audience Report

The 2017 audience report was fun to put together, so you get a 2018 report, too. As an added bonus, it’s done on January 1st, as opposed to late February!

Total Visitors and Views

Google Analytics was running the full year this year, but to ensure the numbers are comparable, I’ll use the built-in WordPress stats again.

2017VisitorsViews
Soapbox1328720034
Main14422819
Softworks8541518
Total1558324371
2018VisitorsViews
Soapbox1955336022
Main11962554
Softworks8801529
Total2162940105

In 2017, we doubled traffic over 2016. We didn’t do quite as well in 2018 over 2018, but we weren’t that far off.

The Soapbox

Once again, the Soapbox leads in visitors and views.

Popular Posts

All-Time

Our most popular posts all-time remain about the same, with the addition of two more Fishbreath entries: the DCS Harrier review, and my wireless hydrometer entry from the summer (which got some good Reddit play).

Battle Royale remains the most popular single post, but is down to a mere 1,477 views this year (from more than 6,000 in 2017). The home page and archives pages (tags and chronological) took the lead at 6,095 views.

Posted This Year

2018’s most popular posts are an interesting bunch.

  1. Fishbreath Flies: DCS AV-8B NA Harrier Review
    A Fishbreath post tops the list! Surprising.

  2. Gravity, Graviton, Pendulum: a wireless hydrometer for homebrewing
    Thanks to Reddit for my success here.

  3. USASOC’s URG-I for the M4
    Parvusimperator will have to tell you what this one means.

  4. SIG P365
    The first traditional civilian gun article on the list.

  5. Competition Meets Tactical: SOCOM and the Vortex Razor HD Gen II 1-6x
    Parvusimperator’s optics reviews are always popular with the Google set.

  6. The Crossbox Studio: multiple mic podcast recording for $60 per person
    I’m making a much better showing on the list this time around. Maybe we should do some further podcasting in 2019.

  7. On the Glock 19X
    Another modern pistols article.

  8. Sweden Chooses an MBT: Looking back at the ’94 contest
    Defense and tanks in particular being one of our main topics, it’s no surprise that one of those articles took a spot in the top 10.

  9. Handicapping the FFG(X) Contenders
    We’re keeping an eye on the competition, and will perhaps write up how we did on our predictions when there’s a result.

  10. Resurrected Weapons: XM806
    Good old resurrected weapons.

Traffic Acquisition

Compared to last year, our traffic share from search dropped from 81% to 75%. Our direct traffic rose 3% to 15%, while our referral traffic rose 3% to 9%.

Google accounted for 70% of our sessions last year, while direct traffic was about 18.5%. Reddit comes in third at 3.3%. These changes indicate to me that we developed a stronger base of regular readers this year.

The most popular traffic source outside of search and social was rumaniamilitary.ro, for which we have a certain reader to thank.

Demographics

The Soapbox’s readers in 2018 were 95% male, compared to 97% last year. I think it’s safe to say we’ve made great strides in inclusiveness and diversity this last year.

Most of our readers are still in the prime 25-44 demographic.

60% of our readers were Americans this year, followed by 5% Canadians and Brits, 2.5% Aussies, Frenchies and Germans, and 1% or less of the following countries: (the rest of the countries in the world). Romania is notably overrepresented relative to its population.

Views By Month

March, May, June, July, and December all saw north of 3,000 views. June came first, on the back of Reddit views of my homebrewing post. Eliminate tose, and it falls to third (approximately tied with May and July). December is second/first, and March is third/second.

We ended the year with a very good month, entirely (I suspect) on the strength of regular readers and newcomers alike having more spare time to crawl the archive.

Random Stuff

In the last year, we (i.e., parvusimperator) wrote 124 posts containing 90,905 words, for an average of 733 per post. All of these numbers are down from our peak in 2015 to 2017, but I’m entirely happy with the schedule and output we’ve maintained this year.

On the other hand, we had 291 comments this year, an average of 1.7 per post. Granted that a lot of those were us (i.e., parvusimperator) answering questions or responding to comments, it’s still encouraging to see a little community forming.

Exercises for the Reader

And now a few questions for you, readers, which you can feel free to answer in the comments.

First: what do you think of the weekly Wednesday What We’re Reading feature? Useful news? Too many links? Too few? Too much editorializing? Too little? We started in August, if you can believe it, and I figure five months is a good length of time for a trial period.

Second: do you miss the podcast? If so, we might be persuaded to do a new run of episodes given some topic suggestions. At the same time, one of the values of we crotchety oldsters here at the Soapbox is that text is the best format for both presenting and consuming arguments and commentary, and we prefer to produce content in that form.

Third: how do you feel about the schedule? Right now, we have a Tuesday and Thursday post most weeks, plus a Wednesday What We’re Reading. Would turning the latter into the Saturday Morning Post be an improvement for you, or do you prefer the weekday diversion?

Finally: give yourself a big pat on the back. We appreciate your readership, your return visits, and your comments, and we look forward to bringing you more of the content you expect from us in 2019. Happy New Year from us here at the Soapbox!

The 2017 Many Words Press Audience Report

It’s that time of year again, which is to say, it’s no longer the previous year, that time when I like to dig into site statistics and come up with some interesting insights for you, the reader.

Total Visitors and Views

Since Google Analytics wasn’t running for the full year (I believe I turned it on again in February), these numbers come straight from the built-in WordPress stats system. It more or less lines up with Google’s numbers for the part of the year where they overlap, so I believe them to be accurate. (Or, at the very least, wrong in the same way all the stats in this article will be.)

VisitorsViews
Soapbox1328720034
Main14422819
Softworks8541518
Total1558324371

In 2017, traffic to the Soapbox doubled compared to 2016; the other two sites held steady.

The Soapbox

As usual, the Soapbox takes the clear victory for both visitors and views.

Popular Posts

All-Time

The most popular few posts of 2017 were published in 2016 or earlier. Parvusimperator’s Battle Royale review of the P320, the PPQ, and the VP9 has been enduringly popular for us, mainly because it got great search engine play. In fact, in 2017, Battle Royale accounted for about 6,600 views at the Soapbox, between a quarter and a third of the views for the year. We tried to catch lightning in a bottle a second time with an M9/P320 comparison, but that ground was too heavily trod for us to make anything of it. We do have some plans for a future post in the same genre, but I won’t spoil them.

The second and third most popular posts also belong to parvusimperator: the Resurrected Weapons entry for 50mm Supershot and his Colt 6920 review.

Posted This Year

More interesting, I think, is the list of most popular posts published in 2017. After all, that’s most likely the year you started reading in, going by our growth from 2016 to 2017.

  1. Movie and Firearms Review: John Wick Chapter 2
    This sort of post is our bread and butter: a fresh take on a niche subject.

  2. The EDC X9 Is Stupid
    Clickbaity, but effective.

  3. Fishbreath Flies: DCS AJS 37 Viggen Review
    I made it into the top ten! I was a little surprised.

  4. How-To: Two USB Mics, One Computer, JACK, and Audacity
    One of a very few guides on how to connect two USB microphones to one computer, this guide was the forerunner to a more detailed how-to I posted earlier this year. Hopefully that one appears on this list next year.

  5. S&W M&P 2.0
    An article from our SHOT 2017 coverage. We’ve had very little of that this year, which may handicap us somewhat. We were also handicapped last year by not actually being present at SHOT. On our list for 2018 is to continue to develop our supply of firearms-related content so that we can get parvusimperator a 2019 SHOT Show press badge.

  6. Glock Trigger Pull Mods
    Parvusimperator’s roundup of things to do to make your Glock less terrible in the trigger did deservedly well.

  7. New VP Pistols from HK
    We aren’t ordinarily a news site, focusing more on the opinion and commentary side of things, but we sometimes make exceptions for news of particular interest to us. Parvusimperator’s a big fan of the VP line, and I confess they have their charms, so we ran with it.

  8. Fishbreath Plays: Starsector 0.8 Kind-Of-Review
    I always try to write up big Starsector updates, because when it hits 1.0, it’s going to be one of the very best space sandboxes of the decade. People seem to like hearing about it.

  9. Wilson Combat’s New EDC X9
    I’m very proud of this one, and of parvusimperator’s work on it. We scooped the major firearms blogs by twelve hours.

  10. Hudson H9 Range Report
    Another SHOT show post, parvusimperator picked up the impressions off of some of his shooting forum buddies.

Traffic Acquisition

The Soapbox, like most websites, gets the overwhelming majority of its traffic from Google searches. 81% of our sessions come from Google. The next 13% are direct traffic.

The other 6% are spread across the lesser search engines, social links, and forum posts. We get the very occasional hit from some hnefatafl websites.

Demographics

97% of the Soapbox’s users are male. The 25-34 demographic is the most popular, although our prime age range is 25-44. (After that, 45-54 comes next, followed by 18-24, then 55+.)

64% of Soapbox sessions in 2017 came from Americans. The UK, Canada, and Australia come in in places two through four, and Romania sits in fifth. (Romania slipped behind Australia very late in the year; we saw a few binges from Australia in the stats late in the year.)

Technology

Curiously, the Soapbox sees more mobile (that is, phone and tablet) views than views from desktops, by about a 60-40 ratio. 55% of our mobile visitors are Apple users; the rest are on Android devices.

Chrome, however, is more popular than Safari, which suggests that a strong majority of desktop users use Chrome. (Sadly, my favored Firefox represents only 7% of our hits.)

Many Words Main

The fiction arm of Many Words Press is dramatically less popular, but it’s my pet project, so I’m going to talk about it in a little depth.

Popular Posts

As expected from a site with ongoing content, the front page is the most popular part of the site by a large margin, followed by the Archives page and the e-books-for-sale page.

Traffic Acquisition

In contrast to the Soapbox, only 5% of the visitors to Many Words Main came from Google searches. Direct traffic was the most common method of arrival, and referrals from various sources came next.

For all the effort I’ve put in getting listed on various web fiction aggregators, we see very little traffic from them.

Demographics

Unfortunately, Many Words Main has no information on demographics; Google can’t tease out information which can’t be linked back to one or several users.

The location information is also less exciting: the US and Canada make up the top 65% of views. China, a bit unusual, comes in at 6%. Every other location on the planet is below 3%.

Technology

Fascinatingly, despite being more e-book-like, Many Words Main is viewed 75-25 on desktops. Apple devices also make up a mere 40% of the mobile views.

Other Sites

Not much to mention here, besides that the most popular Softworks product is our Out of the Park Baseball schedule generator. Even though it’s imperfect—highly so—it’s the only product of its nature with any recent updates, and therefore pretty frequently downloaded.

That’s all I have. Thanks for reading this post, and for your views in 2017. We have big plans for the future, and we’re glad you’re along for the ride.