As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about what draws the most traffic here, I went through and pulled out the top 20 posts from the blog (by traffic) for the calendar year 2014 that were first published in 2014. Numbers after the links are the fraction of the total pageviews for the year that each of these drew, according to Google Analytics:
- “Earthing” Is a Bunch of Crap 1.03%
- Tennis Ball Plus Soccer Ball Equals Blown Minds 0.65%
- Impossible Thruster Probably Impossible 0.55%
- Quick Interstellar Thoughts 0.54%
- What Is Color? 0.52%
- The Physics of Crazy Sleds 0.45%
- Method and Its Discontents 0.43%
- Conceptual Physics Halloween Costumes 2014 0.42%
- The Infinite Variety of Wrong Answers 0.41%
- Repeat After Me: Particle Physics Is Not All of Physics 0.40%
- Nobel Prize for Blue LEDs 0.39%
- Work, finish, Publish 0.35%
- On the Checking of Boxes 0.32%
- Dark Energy, Faster-Than-Light Travel, and Fine-Structure Bombs 0.28%
- Millikan, Einstein, and Planck: The Experiment io9 Forgot 0.28%
- Ten Inessential Papers in Quantum Physics 0.27%
- The Fermi Alternative 0.26%
- Obligatory Cosmos Commentary 0.25%
- Superheros Are Anti-Science 0.25%
- Overwrought Arguments About TED Are an Existential Threat to Our Civilization 0.24%
As usual, that’s… a list of stuff. A little heavy on meta-commentary pieces, and a little light on physics. But then, I’ve been doing a lot of meta-commentary these days, because I don’t have time to do really detailed physics posts. Still, the thing I’m probably happiest about from last year’s blogging was the sticky tape stuff, and that’s another five or six spots down.
Anyway, that’s what I did last year that people really liked. It’s skewed a bit toward stuff from the early part of the year, as those have had more time to integrate up the small trickle of pageviews that come in on all old posts– only four of these posts are from October or later, and two of those were blatant clickbait (Halloween costumes and the Nobel announcement). Might be interesting to compare what’s big within a single calendar year to posts from a single year over a window that includes the next year, to put December posts on a more equal footing; maybe I’ll try that next, looking at 2013.