As part of the Blog Statistics Project I would like to share some bits of the traffic statistics of Photonovice.net. This chunk of the project is about the most popular posts. I don’t check this section of my stats regularly, so seeing the top performing articles was somewhat surprising for me. Listing the top 5 contents for the whole life of the blog shows this:

I wonder whether the first one is really the first one. The basis of my doubts are that:

• the number of unique pageviews for this one is just around the half of the total pageviews, which means that the same people came to see the same content. My experience shows that it can easily happen when someone is using the StumbleUpon tool bar for finding interesting content and the Stumble button occasionally takes the person to the same page again
• furthermore there was a high peak period around end of August last year (two days with more than two thousand daily page views and surrounding days with above 1000), when the majority of that eight thousand page views happend and the top referral at that time was StumbleUpon.

The second one on the list is the starting page. It does not really tell much. When commenting on someone’s blog or in a forum I specify the address of my blog either in the comment form or in my signature. So people arrive to the starting page which is always changing since it shows the most recent 4 or 5 articles all the time.

The third, fourth and fiveth items are parts of a series comparing Lightroom and Nikon Capture NX. I found many times related words in the search terms that brought people to my blog, so people were really looking for this. I wrote these articles orginally when my blog was at Wordpress.com. I migrated all my posts from there to here and deleted the texts of the most visited articles there and put there links pointing to the new location of the articles. One of my top referrer sites is actually my old blog due to these links. So, in short, I think the series is – or rather was, since the software packages have changed since then – relevant for many people and provided answers to their questions.
When I saw the increasing number of page views after writing the first part I decided to write the others. So, the first one originaly was not intended to be the first, but rather one.

And the last one of the top perfomer list is about a software again. HDR (High Dynamic Range) is a popular photographic and post-processing way of creating eye catching, and often over-colored hyperrealistic pictures. And a really free software solution for that, like Qtpfsgui, seems to be interesting for many.

I’m happy to see that the theory works and the real, meaningful and relevant content matters.
Lately I saw that some videos, not made only shared by me, attracted some attention. This is good, this brings people here, they spend time here while watching the videos, and it really can be useful for them, but that’s not the result of my work.

If you are interested in sharing your most popular pictures or articles, you can do that. The Blog Statistics Project is open till the 9th of May, 2008. Join us.