Blog Audience

According to stats that Blogger provides, this music blog last week hit a milestone of 500,000 pageviews for its 9-year lifetime. That's not a lot by some standards, but considering the specialized content here, not too surprising. On this occasion, I took the time to check this number against the more reliable stats from Google Analytics, and learned some interesting things:

• Analytics says this site has had 156K pageviews, lifetime, not 500K. Since Blogger is owned by Google, I wonder why Blogger does not use a more realistic metric. Blogger stats include visits by bots, and are therefore inflated by a percentage that is difficult to determine. In August 2020, Blogger stats for this site averaged around 150 pageviews per day. Google Analytics for August averaged 47 pageviews per day. That's quite a difference.

• The audience, lifetime, has been 46% female, 54% male. Age groups are 28% 18-24, 34% 25-34, 16% 35-44, 13% 45-54, 6% 55-64, 6% 65+. This skews a lot younger than I would have expected! (Total is more than 100% due to rounding.)

• Geographical stats: USA 43%, UK 7%, France 4%, Canada 4%, Germany 4%, Australia 3%, Spain 2%, Brazil 2%, Japan 2%.

• The most-visited pages are pretty much in agreement with the "Popular Posts" that are listed in the sidebar.

The metrics supplied by Google Analytics are largely intended to be helpful to people trying to monetize their site through Google advertising. I'm not interested in cluttering this blog with advertising - although I did sign up for the "Amazon Associates" program that gives me a small return for products purchased via links on these pages.

Thanks to my readers - I hope you have found some of the posts here interesting, useful, and/or educational!