Given my somewhat hit and miss relationship with my blog over the last quarter, it was interesting to look at the statistical review of the year, especially the ‘most popular posts’. These are the five posts which received the greatest number of hits during the year. A hit is a hit, of course, but there is nothing to show how long a visitor stayed, if they arrived on the page and immediately clicked away, or if they stayed to read through to the end.
And before you conclude that I am being too grudging in my celebration of the successful entries on the blog, remember that I know which posts they are, what an odd little collection of random sentences thrown out into the virtual world they comprise. Throughout my three years of blogging I have consistently failed to predict which posts will be popular and which will pass by noticed by only the most constant of readers; there is generally an inverse relationship between the amount of effort I have expended and the hit rate. The post that has received the most hits, ten times more than any other, in the life of this blog, was a description of the experience of queueing to see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery in 2011; a truly unexpected success with a topic I thought would be of limited interest and no longevity. I think the lack of information generally available about the process elsewhere helped it, and, because of the way ‘popularity’ works on the internet, the more hits something gets, the higher it is on search results lists, the more hits it gets.
It is no longer in the Top 5, but there are still posts from 2011 which score highly……. so here we go…. (for ‘Pop Pickers’ Brits of a certain age imagine Alan Feeman’s voice…..)
At number 5 Children of the Sun at the National Theatre in April 2013. (A moderately positive review of a Russian play rarely performed in the UK)
Number 4 True Grit – Mumbling Lisping and Enunciating published in February 2011 (A review of the movie and my fascination with the different way each character spoke)
Number 3 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night- Time at the Apollo Theatre from March 2013 (Written well before the ceiling collapsed on the audience)
Number 2 Old Times at the Harold Pinter Theatre from January 2013 (I didn’t like this one at all)
And finally in top spot The three act structure and reality TV published in February 2011 (The hits peak in January/February and November each year, and are mostly from the US. Could there possibly be a writing course on the subject that kicks off then……?)
My first thought, when I saw this list, was, what was wrong with 2012? And May to December?
Is there anything I can learn from these stats to improve my future hit rates? Hmmmm.
Only write about rarely performed plays? Never be enthusiastic about what I’ve seen? Focus on speech patterns? Use really long; multi worded titles so that they get picked up randomly by people searching for something completely different? Only write January to April?
Any better ideas?
With thanks to Fran at Sequins and Cherry Blossom for putting the idea in my head.
Reading and Writing 
Fran
/ January 3, 2014It’s completely unpredictable so don’t worry about it! Glad to have been the catalyst for this fascinating post.
rowena
/ January 3, 2014I’m not really worried. The pure randomness of it is quite something though, isn’t it?