Eighth Anniversary Post, Time for a Change

It has been a turbulent year for me with moving and other responsibilities.  Since my last anniversary post I have written 27 posts here compared to 41 posts the year before, a 52% decrease.  The decrease in posts is reflected in a 19% decrease in traffic.  This discrepancy in the traffic and the posts suggests that the impact of posts matters more than the mere quantity of them.  

I thought I would take a closer look at what is driving the traffic drop.  Visits to the main blog page were down by 23.91% (1,174 in 2018 from 1,543 in 2017) with similar decreases in the other analytic measures such as time on page and unique page views.  

The most viewed post from 2017-2018 was my post on documentary filmmakers in Johnstown, PA which was posted in January of this year which had 513 views.  Of the top ten most viewed individual posts, 3 were posted in the '17-'18 period.  Of the seven posts in the top 10 which where posted before this year, four of them showed an increase in traffic from the previous year.  This suggests that the enduring popularity of posts from this year and the previous year are have buoyed traffic this year.  The top 10 most seen posts can be seen in the table below.

Page Title	Post from this Year	Pageviews	Unique Pageviews	Avg. Time on Page (s)	Page Value ($)
Johnstown, PA has Been Crawling with Documentary Filmmakers	Y	513	269	7.78	0.00
Hitler, Napoleon, and Stalin: Outsider Despots	N	489	158	11.64	0.00
Hate Groups and Trump's Vote%: Predictive effect present when education and poverty are considered	N	358	86	24.11	0.00
The Civil War in a Larger International Historical Context	N	322	85	12.03	0.00
Election Epilogue	Y	205	87	28.56	0.00
Income and Life Expectancy. What does it Tell Us About US?	N	196	43	30.66	0.00
Events in Annapolis Coincide with Posting on Local Papers	Y	188	71	8.29	0.00
A Geographical Representation of the Mode and Ethnicity	N	150	46	12.61	0.00
Guns and Hate Groups	N	140	33	9.46	0.00
How Do You Use and Consume Math?	N	136	35	17.14	0.00

Google analytics now provides demographic information on users (when their algorithms can decipher it or when they have gmail accounts).  The gender data accounts for only 40.01% of total users.  The bar charts at the left show that the ratio of male to female visitors to the blog remained unchanged for both years.

The data by age and year is shown above.  This graph accounts for 38.17% of total users.  Even though as before the pattern for age groups for 2018 is the same as 2017 with less traffic this year.  For both years users in the age group 25-54 was the most common type of user.

Last night I went to an event sponsored by Public Source called the business of the blog.  They talked about search engine optimization (SEO) and ways to earn money off blogging..  They said that search engines will not show your site unless you buy a domain and move to another platform like Wordpress ($12/year).  I believe that with the current state of my traffic that it is time to take the plunge.  I've done everything I could in the past to build traffic except this by trading URLs with other sites, building a following on Twitter and Facebook, and writing for other publications with some success.

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