Another MS Office clip art, just like last year.
Just kidding! Once again, a big thank you to everyone who bothered to visit, comment on, or link to this blog over the last 12 months. Coinciding with this anniversary, this blog has also drawn its 500,000th visitor, so there is one more reason to celebrate. I'm going to keep the thank you speech short this year, because I only have one speech and I used it last year. There are a few people who probably deserve special mentions, but I have grown lazy over the last year and I've never been good with names (excuses excuses...). I hope you all know who you are :D.
Since this is the most self-centered post of the year, it wouldn't be right if there wasn't a big stats dump. Just like last year, I have inserted my own artwork to break up the wall of text. If you are not interested in reading the numbers, feel free to skip to the end.
Stats graph for the last 12 months courtesy of Statcounter.
Green is page loads, blue is unique visits, and orange is returning visits.
This is the 911th post of this blog, which means I've made 398 posts this year, down from last year's 513. As of now, this blog has had over 500,000 visitors and 830,000 page loads in total, which means that the last 12 months has drawn 370,000 visitors and 620,000 page loads. Over the last year, visitor numbers grew slowly but steadily, and nowadays this blog is averaging 1200 visitors and 2200 page loads a day with 170-200 feed subscribers. The numbers aren't that impressive compared to some of the more popular blogs out there, but this is easily the most popular website in my collection. The increase in visitors is a surprise since I certainly didn't put in any more effort than before and I went on an extended vacation in May (noticeable dip in the graph above), but I'm thankful that more people are finding their way to this site. Maybe the traffic growth is just for being here for long enough. If nothing else, this site is getting more hits from Google Image Search, especially images from the Queen's Blade series (I wonder why). Another piece of good new is actual readership or at least commenting seemed have increased too. Currently, the total comment count stands at over 4800. As the comment count was around 1600 at the end of the first year, it means commenting has doubled last year compared to the first year. 3200 comments in a year is still not much considering I've made 400 posts, but I realize that summary blogs that aren't really popular or have a big team of authors don't draw a lot of comments. I'm happy with the progress though, and those who bothered to leave (non-spam and non-flame) comments last year have my appreciation.
I believe I can fly...
Here are a few more possibly interesting statistics (courtesy of Google Analytics):
- Most visited post in the last year: Tenjou Tenge 134 with over 5100 page views. The top ten consists of three Tenjou Tenge posts, two Queen's Blade posts, two Gantz posts, a To-Love-Ru post and my scathing review of the Eureka Seven movie (which is by far the most commented post on this blog). I'm not surprised Tenjou Tenge took up three spots as it is a fairly popular series with a spotty translation effort, but I definitely underestimated the popularity of Queen's Blade.
- Most popular blogged series of the year: Fullemtal Alchemist (anime + manga), which is no surprise at all given that it's a massively popular series that ended within the last year. Even though Brotherhood was covered by so many blogs out there, it's still the biggest source of traffic for this site over the last 12 months. It's just an indication of how large the fan base is for this series.
The second most popular series was Queen's Blade thanks to all the hits from Google Image Search. - Top (non-search engine) referrers: Random Curiosity (reborn and stronger than ever), AnimeBlips (takes your feed without notifying you first, but decent source of traffic), and the old and reliable Anime Nano.
- Top three blog referrers: Random Curiosity, Sea Slugs! and Star Crossed. This is no surprise given that these are three of the most popular episodic blogs out there, and I admire those guys for finding ways to keep their sites running for so long while keeping things interesting at the same time.
- Top commenter: Anonymous. I didn't need a stats tracking program to know that lol.
The only thing I've drawn that has green as one of the dominant colors.
As mentioned before, this was the year I started getting lazy with this blog. Over the last year, I posted less, commented less on other blogs and made less effort to reach out to new blogs. Part of my decreasing effort was due to real life commitments, and part of it is just lack of motivation. The "new blog smell" is wearing off, and I'm just not as driven as before and more content to sit back and do my own thing. I'll try to be less lazy next year, although I make no promises. Since I'll be in grad school soon and will likely be busier than I have ever been before, there might even be the question of whether this blog will survive to its third birthday. I will do whatever I can to keep this place alive, but next year there might be even more cutbacks. Then again, I managed to write through my last undergrad year, so maybe next year won't be so bad. A busier schedule will also be more motivation for me to improve my writing style, especially when it comes to conciseness. I'm not aiming to be insightful, but I think more conciseness and humour would benefit both myself and the readers. Shorter summaries may be in order, although I keep saying this but haven't followed through yet.
Mecha is about the only thing that I can draw reasonably well.
So to sum up my plans for next year: I'll try my best to keep this blog alive, but posting might suffer a bit. To try to make up for the decrease in posts, I'll probably make a new theme since this blog is due for a makeover. There is nothing majorly wrong with the current look, but it looks a bit generic. I have been designing mascots for this blog, and I probably should incorporate them into the look of the site. That's all the plans I have now for next year. I'm not thinking about moving this blog any more despite what everyone told me in the first anniversary post. Thanks to those suggestions though, I now run a few self-hosted WordPress blog these days and they have a lot of advantages over Blogger, but Blogger isn't horrible enough to make me want to move two years of posts, comments, and readership. If I wanted to move, I should have made up my last year and did it, but it's too late now. Unless Google suddenly pulls the plugs on Blogger, this blog will be staying right where it is.
Finally, a piece of artwork that's actually anime/manga-related. Maid guitar rocks!
Once again, I have wasted hours writing about a bunch of unimportant stuff that's not even anime or manga related. If you read up to this point, thanks you very much for bearing with me and thank you all again for the support. Hopefully I'll be writing another one of these posts the same time next year, and let's see if this little blog can get into the 1 million visitors club.
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