It’s been a while since I did some navel-gazing about who reads this blog and where they come from. This week, quantixed is close to 25K views and there was a burst of people viewing an old post, which made me look again at the visitor statistics.
Where do the readers of quantixed come from?
Well, geographically they come from all around the world. The number of visitors from each country is probably related to: population of scientists and geographical spread of science people on Twitter (see below). USA is in the lead, followed by UK, Germany, Canada, France, Spain, Australia, etc.
Where do they click from? This is pretty interesting. Most people come here from Twitter (45%), around 20% come via a search on Google (mainly looking for eLife’s Impact Factor) and another ~20% come from the blog Scholarly Kitchen(!). Around 3% come from Facebook, which is pretty neat since I don’t have a profile and presumably people are linking to quantixed on there. 1% come from people clicking links that have been emailed to them – I also value these hits a lot. I guess these links are sent to people who don’t do any social media, but somebody thought the recipient should read something on quantixed. I get a few hits from blogs and sites where we’ve linked to each other. The remainder are a long list of single clicks from a wide variety of pages.
What do they read?
The traffic is telling me that quantixed doesn’t have “readers”. I think most people are one-time visitors, or at least occasional visitors. I do know which posts are popular:
- Strange Things
- Wrong Number
- Advice for New PIs
- Publication lag times I and II
- Violin plots
- Principal Component Analysis
Just like my papers, I’ve found it difficult to predict what will be interesting to lots of people. Posts that took a long time to prepare and were the most fun to think about, have received hardly any views. The PCA post is most surprising, because I thought no-one would be interested in that!
I thoroughly enjoy writing quantixed and I really value the feedback that I get from people I talk to offline about it. I’m constantly amazed who has read something on here. The question that they always ask is “how do you find the time?”. And I always answer, “I don’t”. What I mean is I don’t really have the free time to write this blog. Between the lab, home life, sleep and cycling, there is no time for this at all. The analyses you see on here take only three hours or less. If anything looks tougher than this, I drop it. If draft posts aren’t interesting enough to get finished, they get canned. Writing the blog is a nice change from writing papers, grants and admin. So I don’t feel it detracts from work. One aim was to improve my programming through fun analyses; and I’ve definitely learnt a lot about that. The early posts on coding are pretty cringe-worthy. I also wanted to improve my writing which is still a bit dry and scientific…
My favourite type of remark is when people tell me about something that they’ve read on here, not realising that I actually write this blog! Anyway, whoever you are, wherever you come from; I hope you enjoy quantixed. If you read something here and like it, please leave a comment, tweet a link or email it to a friend. The encouragement is appreciated.
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The post title is taken from “Where You Come From” by Pantera. This was a difficult one to pick, but this song had the most apt title, at least.
Just wondering if your analysis includes news/blog aggregating apps? I am a ‘reader’ but I never access your site directly is all… anyway, congrats on the visits tally! Wish I had more time for mine, it really is great to have a space for writing practice/code practice etc.
I don’t think it does. Thanks for reading!