The Blog Stat Blog – Ian Wharton

You may have noticed that I love a good blog almost as much as I love a good stat, so when I recently got access to the stats part of the Red Rose website, well!!!

The website gathers stats on hits to all the pages including the blogs. It does only include the views on the website itself and I know that some of you (42 at the last count) have registered for the mail updates and read those instead. If you want to register for the mail update for a regular dose of RRRR excitement that is the blog, then simply register on the right of the page. It’s over there ————–>

Can you see it? It says e-mail address and under it a big red ‘Subscribe’ button. Do that and you’ll get all this blogtastic fun sent straight to your favourite mail address.

While that’s brilliant, it will mean that while you will see all the blogiest stuff right away, you won’t register on my stats. 🙁

Anyway, we have all these blog stats as well as the stats from hits before the blog was around so here is the first (but probably not the last) Blog stats blog.

Looking at the monthly hits over the last few years, for all the site pages (graph below) the hits per month is all over the place, but generally each year sees a little growth

The total number of hits per year (below) illustrates the growth each year. Of course we are only part way through 2016 so far.

and May has the largest peak each year.
The peak is due to the Worden 10k Red Rose race. It’s most likely down to runners checking for race results in the days after the race. At the time of writing, we haven’t hit that yet, so we haven’t experienced the same peak just yet.

2013 and 2014 (above) had about the same hits in May but 2015 had a massive amount of growth. No idea why but perhaps it’s due to the club growth over the last few years or maybe we just had more entries last year.

In any event, we aren’t quite there yet but if we just look at 2015 and so far this year

We almost had the same hits on the site in April as the May peak in 2015. I suspect that is due to the interest in the blogs and the rate in March 2016 was high as well.

If I work out the average number of hits per day, it gives me an excuse to put an exploded pie chart in below and also shows that 2016 has certainly continued the growth, even though we haven’t yet completed our busiest month.

So…..

Having gratuitously stat’d all over the place, which blogs have been most popular?

When I started writing this, the result was clear and then almost immediately changed.

At the time, ‘Feet in the clouds – Pita Oates’ was in first place with 210 hits
‘London Marathon – Gareth Bell’ and ‘Learning to Run and Running to Learn – Steve Bladon’ were close for second.
Randomly ‘The Red Rose Blog – Ian Wharton’ keeps getting the odd hit now and again. It is one of the oldest blogs on the site so has had more chance for exposure.

Then we had a cluster with ‘London Marathon – Steeeeeevvoooooooooo’, ‘Boston (Half) marathon – Steve Bladon’ and a late entry ‘Running Helped Me Believe – Dreams Do Come True – Carla Davies’ storming up the charts with ‘TP100 – David Brunton’ close behind.

Dave Brunton has 152 hits, so you can see they were all very close.

Then May 10th happened and a minor case of something going viral. Well maybe not entirely viral but certainly something was a bit catching.

‘Learning to Run and Running to Learn – Steve Bladon’ got over 300 hits in one day and then the same thing happened the next day.

Right now, he has blown away everyone else with a total of 1013!! It seems to have quietened down again now but still got 22 hits so far today. The post has obviously been seen and shared far outside the Red Rose audience.

It seems to have been kicked off simply by a family member sharing the post on Facebook. It is, I suppose a perfect example of the potential for content to become distributed far beyond where we could reasonably expect.

So there we have it, the results are out. I think it will be asking a lot to beat Steve now, at least not until the club grows a bit or unless someone cheats and just keeps hitting refresh (Now there’s an idea).