Reading Audience

Every once in a while I post something that elicits some responses and reminds me, with a bit of a wide-eyed jolt, that people actually read this blog. In that spirit, I looked up the stats tab of "traffic sources" and discovered the following:

1) The majority of traffic that arrives on this blog comes from the Korean version of Google. I thought for several minutes about the few Korean friends I have, pondered whether my sister-in-law might secretly be connecting with her heritage by doing her internet searches in Korean (answer:no) and came to the conclusion that my site address must closely resemble some culturally important Korean site. To all of the Korean searchers to have ended up on my blog accidentally, I'm very sorry that you missed your turn. Please feel free to have a look around and enjoy the two trouble-making boys' antics before you depart. Unless you are some sort of creepy identity thief, in which case I'm going to start writing all of my blogs in Latin.

2) The American version of Google is my next largest internet source, followed by references to previous entries that I've made on my own blog. This all seems normal.

3) The next highest source for traffic was a random string of numbers. I decided to click it and see what happened, and then quickly thought better of myself. What if this website was some sort of phishing high-tech scam? Or something dirty and pornographic? Was this a safe decision? I then remembered that I have another 5 hours to kill before the concert tonight, so I decided to click and see what happened. I got a dead webpage.

4) The next most popular sources of web traffic (generating one pageview each) were 100searchengines.com, a blog called BudgetConfidential, and the British version of Google. Probably the Brit stumbled upon my blog by searching for some very technical and highly skilled literary criticism, like the time I wrote about when Owen tried to eat my copy of Milton's complete poems. I hope they weren't too disappointed.

5) Last of all, generating one page view, and I truly have no explanation for this...yeastinfection.org

6) 42% of my readers use the browser Safari, 20% use Chrome, 19% use Firefox, and apparently 12% use Internet Explorer, although I find it hard to believe that the Internet Explorer number could possibly be that high. Probably the Microsoft Corporation paid Blogger to artificially inflate that number. 86% of readers were either using a Windows operating system or running iOS. Apparently someone somewhere has accessed my blog using Linux.

7) By country, I've received 418 pageviews from my fatherland, the good old USA. Next is South Korea (again, I think you have the wrong stop) at 41, and then Russia at 16. Portugal (?) is next at 10, 5 from Ireland and Poland, 4 from France, 2 from Slovakia, and 1 each from Canada and Germany. I would have thought that Canada could do better. Where I'm currently writing this in Buffalo, I can pretty much see Canada over the river. Get your act together, Canada.