2024: My Most Successful Year in Blogging

When I first re-engaged my blog during the pandemic in 2020, I was always checking the daily statistics to see how my posts were doing. As I’ve written about numerous times now, that whole process — posting half a dozen times a day or more and obsessively checking the statistics — is what became my escapism, or coping mechanism, as it were, for my mental health. It was my catharsis until I actually received real therapy and help to address my depression and anxiety. Once that occurred, I stopped obsessing over how often I was posting daily (and keeping it going on a consecutive basis) and looking at the statistics. As such, I tend to only look at them now for posts like this, a year-end wrap-up, which is all a preamble to say: I was gobsmacked. I checked my yearly statistics for 2024 a few times to make sure I was looking at it correctly.

I did this wrap-up in 2024 about my year in blogging for 2023. At the time, I was elated because 2023, which was my 10th year of blogging, marked my most successful year ever by a considerable margin. Prior to 2023, the most views I’ve ever received in a single year of blogging was way back in 2014 at 41,868. Even when I was going strong in 2020 and beyond, I never touched that number. Then, in 2023, I hit 72,738. That’s an 82 percent increase year-over-year, but it was significantly bolstered by October (17,100 views), November (9,700) views, and December (12,000) views. The rest of the year’s monthly views were typically in the 3,000 to 4,400 range.

In 2024, I hit 219,201 views. That represents a more than 208 percent increase year-over-year, or slightly tripling what I did in 2023, making 2024 easily the most successful year I’ve ever had in blogging. And this time, it was more consistent month-to-month throughout the year: January started with 14,300 views, the summer months picked up to 21,500 in June, 22,600 in July, and peaked for the year at 24,500 in August. November and December went back to pre-summer months territory.

It should be noted that those views are not just from what I wrote in 2024, but all my posts for the lifetime of the blog (2,589 posts!).

Some other stats from 2024:

• I posted 128 times, which, given my reading roundup from the other day, I know 113 of those posts are book reviews. The other 15 were movie, TV show, and podcast reviews (as well as year-end roundups).
• To make that many posts, I wrote 152,000 words, which is astonishing when you consider an average book manuscript is between 70,000 and 120,000 words, depending on the book. For the record, that’s considerably down from last year’s 163,200 words, and definitely down from 2022’s ridiculous 338,100 words.
• There were 182,098 visitors to my blog, also an increase of 208 percent increase over last year’s 59,137 visitors.
• The biggest post of the year was a book review I did in 2023, Jeneva Rose’s You Shouldn’t Have Come Here, at 9,582 views, followed by Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls (in 2024) at 8,378, and Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Uses of Sorrow” (I posted it in 2020) at 8,142. I’m happy to see the homepage itself is the 9th most visited post/page at 5,916.
• Not surprisingly, the vast majority, or 85 percent, of my referrals (how people find the site) come from search engines at 186,351 referrals (primarily Google). Interestingly, Facebook accounts for 202 referrals, even though I rarely ever post my blog to Facebook, and another 176 come from reddit, another place I don’t post to. I do post to Twitter and 98 referrals came from there, so woohoo! Interestingly, I also post to Instagram, and only 20 referrals came from there. Fun, random fact: The New York Film Academy referenced one of my film reviews for their student resources. ChatGPT has also been a referral for me 23 times, apparently.
• Most of my “readers” are from my the United States at 148,250, followed by the United Kingdom at 14,142, and Canada at 12,748. But India, Australia, the Philippines, Germany, New Zealand, Ireland, and Brazil all represented! I would be absolutely fascinated to learn what people from different languages and cultures think about my posts.
• Finally, I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but interesting to note, 74 percent of people who read my blog do so through their mobile device (mostly iPhone users by three times as many!).

This is partly why I haven’t moved to the shiny new objects, like a Substack: time invested and it’s starting to pay off, literally. Aside from gaining more views and visitors than ever, 2024 also marked the first time I was ever paid for blogging, due to the ads served on the platform. And it happened twice! We’ll see what 2025 brings.

Thank you for reading!