One of the most interesting features that WordPress offers is the ability of users to determine what countries they’re generating traffic from.
Beginning in late February, WordPress, the platform on which I host this site, added a feature which allows bloggers to track visits by country on a daily, weekly, monthly and overall basis.
Some of the viewership statistics for this blog have been rather astonishing, not to mention mystifying, to say the least. It’s not so much total numbers that have me scratching my head, but where the figures are coming from.
The five countries where the Cotton Boll Conspiracy has generated the most traffic is hardly a surprise; the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and India are all English-speaking nations, or, in the case of India, has a significant portion of its population that speaks English.
The next five countries are a little less predictable: Germany, France, Italy, Turkey and the Netherlands. However, English is a popular secondary language in most, if not all, those nations.
Then with Nos. 11-15 it starts to get a bit odd. Visitors from Spain, the Philippines, Brazil, Sweden and Poland have tallied over 1,250 visits between them in less than three months.
There isn’t a whole lot in common with those five nations, as near as I can tell, except that Spain once ruled over the Philippines, and didn’t do a very good job of it, either.
In fact, the entire statistical recap from this point on seems to be one anomaly after another.
According to the WordPress calculations, this blog has gotten more views from Pakistan since late February (177) than Ireland (155), Norway (156) is ahead of New Zealand (150), and Romania (133) is edging out South Africa (132).
The most interesting aspect of this whole affair, though, is how far-reaching the Internet has become, at least as evidenced by the long-distance statistics this penny-ante blog has generated.
Since Feb. 25, it’s registered views from more than 140 counties.
Among nations where visitors have stopped by from: the island nations of Cape Verde, Cyprus, Mauritius, Madagascar and the Maldives; the Caribbean countries of Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, Grenada, and Trinidad and Tobago; and tiny African nations such as Benin, Malawi, Gambia and Guinea-Bissau.
Viewers from 12 of the 15 former Soviet “republics” have stopped by, as well, with all but Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan represented.
WordPress even shows viewers from a handful of “outpost” locales, including:
- Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands;
- Macau, the former Portuguese colony that is now a special administrative region of China;
- The Falkland Islands, the South Atlantic archipelago that the Argentines try to wrest from the British every so often;
- The Netherland Antilles, which may or may not still be part of The Netherlands; and
- The Faroe Islands, a self-governing country under the sovereignty of the Denmark located in the North Atlantic.
So what does it all mean? Good question.
At first glance, it would seem to indicated that things are really, really boring in some parts of the world. What else can one take away if folks in Mozambique, Tajikistan and Fiji are turning to this blog for entertainment?
Then again, perhaps their entertainment comes from seeing what appears on this blog, not the quality of the content. Yet, it seems hard to believe that whether one is a yak herder in Mongolia or a baccarat dealer in Monaco there’s much to draw in individuals from some of the more distant regions of the globe.
Yes, the Internet exists just about everywhere nowadays, but the fact is that much of the world is still too busy trying to survive to find time to surf the web, never mind spend a few precious minutes on the aimless ramblings of a 40-something whose main interests are history, hockey, reading, NASCAR, fishing and, most important, spending time with my wife and kids.
Then again, stranger things have happened.
Now, how to break into that coveted demographic of Zambia and Zimbabwe and that lovely country that used to be called Zaire?
The Cotton Boll Conspiracy 
My day is made when a new country comes up on the stats map! I wonder who is looking at my blah blah blahs from their much more exotic location. Surely they have more interesting things to look at?!
I suspect that there are homesick expats all over the world that love a dose of their homeland, otherwise that 1 view I regularly get from Thailand and Viet Nam make no sense at all!
I could definitely see expatriates tuning in for a dose of what’s going on back home. Also, travelers looking to see what’s in the news back home, as well.
As to why they’d pick this blog as one of their sources, that’s a question I can’t answer.
Just think of the minds you could mess with, though, if you spent a few days in, say Djibouti or Kiribati and picked out a few blogs and clicked repeatedly on stories on their sites.
Of course, it would be a great way to find out who the real blowhards are: “Hey, look at me, I HUGE on the Horn of Africa!” or “Wow, I’m killing it among the South Pacific tropical atolls!”
Oh yeah, you could just confuse the hell out of people, couldn’t you? Especially if you also left comments in a completely unrelated non-English language. 🙂
I got a hit from Moldova the other day. I admit I was pretty excited, Who? Why? I wish they had made a comment! (in English 😉 )
I’ve gotten a few comments in Cyrillic and generally assumed them to be spam, given that the stories they were posted to had nothing to do with Russian or Eastern Europe. I’ll have to remember to take the next one I get and put it through an online translator, just to see what they’re saying.
I had two views from Bangladesh and two from Armenia so far today and I haven’t even posted anything in a couple weeks. I can see how somebody my do a google search on a specific topic that I’ve written about and my blog pop up and they maybe just look at my blog to see what I had to say about it or click around a bit out of curiosity. But like you I’m a little baffled by the world viewers who visit me sometimes, sometimes with multiple over days, from some far flung places.
It would be interesting to see what stories exactly catch the attention of those from far afield. Perhaps, as someone else commented earlier, it’s simply expatriates looking for a taste of home. Or quite possibly people from the US visiting other areas.
However, I find it hard to believe that a US citizen traveling through, say, Sao Tome and Principe or Bhutan would have the time or interest in reading my half-backed blather, no matter who slow things might be in those parts of the world.
Most of my views come from US (5,537), UK (852),
Canada (542), Australia (345), France (315) and Ireland following those. But then I have a few loyal readers from the lat five countries who read my babbling. I’m glad WordPress added this feature. Now I can see I’m getting views from countries I’ve never even heard of! It’s also fun to look through people’s search queries, some being hilarious. Enjoyed this post!
Yes, a glance at the search queries can really leave you scratching your head. How one gets from “yellow milking cow,” or the like, to my blog will always be a mystery.
I had an astonishingly high number of hits from Thailand on a post that I had done several months earlier. I found that a link to my blog had been put into a document on a Thai site. I have no idea what the document was about as it had been written in Thai script. I must admit that I take hits from anyplace at all – stats are very addictive!
Yes, I’ll take the views wherever I can get them.
I suppose one of the benefits of writing in English, as opposed to, say Basque or Berber, is that a good part of the world can read your posts.
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