31 October 2012

Development Horizons: Big in Norway--But Why?

Development Horizons has been going for about 3 years now--about 300 blogs and 185,000 page views.

One of my collaborators in India has been telling me that I am hopeless at getting the blog to have a wider readership, and so I have been looking at the stats that Blogger software generates.

One of the stats is the top ten page reads by country of reader. The table below summarises the countries in order of page reads. I have calculated the page reads by population size and by number of internet users (columns 2 and 3 respectively).
Which country has the top readership per internet user? Not the UK, but Norway. Other interesting points:
  • 185,000 feels low--600 reads per post on average. Other bloggers---what do you think?
  • China and India and 3rd and 5th in terms of absolute readership--emerging powers indeed
  • On a per internet user basis, Ukraine is the fourth largest readership--again, I have no idea why
  • I was surprised that Japan is not in the list--perhaps a language issue? Japanese readers, what do I need to do to get the blog more widely read
  • No country in Africa listed, although lately South Africa has featured more strongly-this is partly to do with internet access and speeds--anything to do here?
  • No country in Latin America listed--I am relatively uninformed about the region, and it shows (and the language does not help)
As for Norway.  Why Norway?  I'm not sure.

Norway has a deep interest in international development, peace, participation and human rights and these surely resonate with IDS interests and values. But are Denmark and Sweden so far behind? (By now I have probably alienated the entire Norwegian readership by comparing them to other Scandinavian countries. It could have been worse, I could have gone for the Nordic comparison.)

Perhaps it is institutional connections? IDS has some connections with Noragric, FAFO and Chr. Michelsen Institute, but we have more with Swedish organisations. We have a Board member, Jon Lomoy, from Norway too. We also have one Norwegian Research Fellow, Lars Otto Naess, head of our climate change team.

Personal connections? I gave a talk last year at the Research Council of Norway's annual meetings. I know some of the Noragric folks (Ruth Haug and colleagues) and some of the food security, nutrition and human rights community (Arne Oshuag, Asbjorn Eide and Wenche Barthe-Eide). But I know as many from other countries in the region.

Does any of this really explain a rate equivalent to over one-in-a-thousand internet users in Norway visiting Development Horizons in the latest 3 years? Maybe it is the name of a prominent tourism website in Norway? In any case, a puzzle.

In the final analysis, perhaps it all boils down to Norway's inherent good taste!

In any case, a warm tusen takk to you all.

8 comments:

Eesh said...

Does Blogger track views within an RSS feed or does it only count clicks on the blogger URL?

Lisa said...

Many of us just read it by email (and forward the email version to others) - good if you can factor this in somehow. Keep it up! We depend on you for great insights.

Simon said...

Well you certainly have a broad appeal, this is not the heyday of blogs. There are too many by professional journalists and writers, I think, and there is a lot more available than there was when blogs first arrived on the scene.

But I have been blogging for a bit longer, posted a lot more than you and yet I have fewer than half your pageviews. I always go by the visitor figures, which are a lot lower than pageviews, and which I get from Statcounter.com.

Wordpress gives far better statistics than Blogspot and all the figures are suspect if you don't really know what exactly counts as a visitor (a cookie), but your numbers sound good to me. Perhaps I should subject my own to further analysis.

Unknown said...

The blog has been set up using Google's Feedburner service which tracks those subscribing by RSS. Google Analytics shows the Source as Feedburner therefore we can accurately see how many visitors have viewed the page via RSS.

xcaucasus said...

Would be interesting to test empirically why so many people follow you in Norway. One explanation may be that a couple of academics put you on a curriculum. That typically makes a huge difference!

Pauline Thomas said...

Can one claim that perhaps the range of readership blogger have depends on the number of students in the certain area and the people's accessibility to the internet. For me, that's one reason why a netizen stumble upon a certain blog site.

Darryl Chancy said...

We can never be sure on why are they your most frequent visitors because asking them one by one would be impossible. But you have to be happy with that number of visits.

Competency Development Sustainability said...

"Development Horizons: Big in Norway--But Why?" Developments on the horizons by lawrence haddad generally matte in developing a goo business. For a person is very difficult to start any business and futher progress in future it will grow and grow. Competency in Development and Sustainability will make our development well organized. Posted a lot more than you and yet I have fewer than half your page views.