It's not the numbers it's the geography. If the truth be told, my range is pretty constant. If I blog a lot, I have about 25,000 visitors a month. If I'm sparser in posting, I drop to about 17,000. At the peak of Naked Conversations, we were hitting 30,000 a month and when Robert and I got into a virtual barroom brawl with Amazon's CTO, we had our only 50,000 visitor month ever. I don't really need to look to know what's going on there. The signals I get from Technorati, Typepad and Analytics all reinforce the accuracy of each other. They come closer all the time.
What fascinates me, and the reason I spend time every day on Google Analytics is the map overlay of where people are sitting when they visit this blog. If you look at it by continent, country and city many stories get told. I am more popular by far in cities where I've made public appearances than not. About 40 percent of my readership comes from outside the US. Per total population, I am more widely read in Canada than in the US.
I am more popular in Dublin than anywhere else on Earth. I assume Analytics includes in includes Cork, where I have visited twice and enjoy a few ongoing friendships and conversations with people there. Toronto and London are usually in my top five or six cities and they are also places where I maintain friendships and have spoken. I'm bigger in Tallinn, Estonia than in Moscow and that is no surprise. When I wrote about Russia being a cyberbully to their little neighbor, my Tallinn readership swelled by over 500%. Actually, it was the first time I saw noticeable readership in Moscow as well and it is nice to know that even when I'm shouting, someone seems to be listening.
Mentions help. When my friend KD Paine spoke in Dubai, she mentioned me. My readership there shot from 2 to about 90. Now a month later, I have an average of 35 visits a day from Dubai, and that residual impact is greatly appreciated.
The diversity is amazing. I have been visited in the past month by people on all continents, residing in 2,234 communities. I had a regular reader in Rwanda, but he seems to have disappeared.Overall, I have nearly 300 African visitors daily. I have 11 readers in the Palestinian territories and as many readers in Arab states as I have in Israel. Someone in a place called Petah Tiqua seems to read me daily. More than 500 people read me in the happy isles of Oceana.
To my knowledge, there has never been a day when my readership from any city on Earth has exceeded four percent of my total. This pleases me because it indicates that this blog is sort of a global neighborhood onto itself. Speaking of which, Global Neighborhoods is not spiked as a couple of fictitious blog characters have written. It is postponed. I needed to get my consultng business going again and it is coming along nicely. But there will be a book and my return to serious work on it is not all that far away.
