Year-End Blog Statistics: Who's Out There

It’s nearly the end of the year, and I’m still wondering about carrying on this weblog. I don’t really “blog,” of course. Real bloggers write several times a day, in short bits, about lots of different things. This blog is more like a column that I self-publish once or twice a week. So who cares?

I’ve published 152 entries since I started a couple of years ago. Over this past year, the trend of visits has been upward, to an average of 5000-5500 visits per month. Is that a lot? It isn’t much compared to very popular Christian scholarly bloggers such as Scot McKnight or Ben Witherington, I’m sure. But I’m gratified by the quality of readers evident in some of the comments and by the e-mails acquaintances old and new sometimes send me. Thanks for each one, friends!

The ratio of comments to posts is about 10:1, but commenting varies wildly in quality and quantity depending on the post. I like to think that most of my readers mostly agree with me most of the time, and thus merely nod their heads sagely at the end of a column and move on without commenting. I realize there are other ways of construing the statistics on this matter, but hey, that’s what I like to think, okay?

I look forward to this new year and to blogging some more. I’ve got a few hot topics in the bin yet that I hope will interest you, too. Subscribe (directions can be found via the Pages on the top right of the main page) if that will convenience your reading. Send along a link to friends who might enjoy this sort of writing. (Most readers apparently are North American, not surprisingly. But it’s been great to see readers popping up consistently in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Korea–and sometimes also in farflung places in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I’d be glad for more comments from those countries to help me understand issues from these other points of view.)

If you would like to see particular subjects addressed here, please let me know. And please do comment: A great deal of the reward of this non-lucrative venture is interaction, so interact, you lurkers!