Traffic Report - the blog stats for March

Oh dear. Yet another too-much-time-on-my-hands month!

On Froogville, there were 67 posts (though 20 of those were my largely wordless 'Photography Week' series) and around 19,000 words. (Also, probably the busiest-ever month for comments, with almost 200. However, there were special reasons for that - see below.)

On Barstool Blues, there were 41 posts and just over 14,000 words.

Yes, it was a frenetic month on Froogville - and all because of one frivolous post about the young nationalist berserkers of China's online forums, the amusing little beasties that we know as the fenqing. First, my blog-pal Jeremiah mentioned it on his Granite Studio blog; then, The Peking Duck, probably the mostly widely read of the laowai China blogs, recommended it. And then, a week later, the illustrious Andrew Sullivan featured it on his blog at The Atlantic. And now, I have just discovered - thanks to the wonders of Google Analytics, which I have only just begun to play with - that I was also featured (translated into Chinese!) in this forum in the fenqing rumpus room that is Anti-CNN (hence a lot of angry Chinese stopping by lately).

What does all this do to one's traffic? Well, this (according to Statcounter):

More than 600 'unique visitors' in 3 days, following Richard's shout-out on The Duck.

But hey, look, I got very nearly that many in the space of just a few hours after Andrew Sullivan quoted me!

Most of those are going to be one-time-only visitors, I suppose; but.... this final graphic does suggest that, since this flurry of excitement in the middle of last month, the average daily number of my readers has remained higher than before - nearly twice as high, in fact. And I note that, whereas I used to have only a handful of regular readers in the States, and none in China (the 3 or 4 friends that I know follow the blogs here probably all use proxies, and thus don't "show up" as China-based), I now have 30-40 daily visits from the States and 20 from China.

Because of 'The Spike', the number of visits to Froogville last month was very nearly 3,000. I wonder what April's total will be?

The Barstool is still pottering on as before, at around 1,000 visits per month. I wonder what I can do to generate more controversy on here??

Oh, before I go..... I would also like to draw your attention to two recent features that I've linked to in my sidebars: Froog's Beijing Restaurant Guide and Froog's Beijing Bar 'Dead Pool' (predict the next bar to go out of business!). Please go and take a look, and contribute your thoughts.