Last year on May 6th I posted what were the most popular reviews on Rat’s Reading because I’d been watching traffic for a year at that time. It’s been two years now, so it’s time for an update:
The top 12 reviews are:
| Rank | Old rank | Title / Author | Views (2009) | Views (2008) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Principles of Macroeconomics: Third Edition / N. Gregory Mankiw | 5244 | 248 |
| 2 | (>=195) | Essays on the Great Depression / Ben S. Bernanke | 1180 | (<= 1) |
| 3 | 3 | The Feminine Mystique / Betty Friedan | 783 | 175 |
| 4 | 39 (tie) | Blink / Malcolm Gladwell | 775 | 15 |
| 5 | 5 | Beyond Good And Evil / Friedrich Nietzsche | 498 | 72 |
| 6 | 9 | Better Homes and Gardens Biggest Book of Casseroles | 490 | 50 |
| 7 | 49 (tie) | The Communist Manifesto / Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels | 430 | 11 |
| 8 | 6 | Fahrenheit 451: 50th Anniversary Ed. / Ray Bradbury | 423 | 57 |
| 9 | Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice: 4th Edition / Charles E. Bressler | 418 | (not posted) | |
| 10 | 8 | The Best American Short Stories of 1969 / Martha Foley ed. and David Burnett ed. | 360 | 53 |
| 11 | 2 | Before They Are Hanged / Joe Abercrombie | 358 | 185 |
| 12 | How to Lie with Statistics / Darrell Huff | 314 | (not posted) |
Only 2 new posts made it to the list, but 3 additional ones found an audience they hadn’t as of a year ago. Two of those because they got hooked by Google Image Search. Definitely a bias towards old reviews.
To counter that bias I cooked up a second table (as I did last year). I averaged the views over the number of days since the review was published. Here are those results:
| Rank | Old Rank | Title / Author | Average Views per Day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7 | Principles of Macroeconomics: Third Edition / N. Gregory Mankiw | 7.17 |
| 2 | Essays on the Great Depression / Ben S. Bernanke | 2.39 | |
| 3 | (not posted) | Mainspring /Jay Lake | 2.2 |
| 4 | 9 | Blink / Malcolm Gladwell | 1.98 |
| 5 | 3 | The Feminine Mystique / Betty Friedan | 1.77 |
| 6 | (not posted) | Twilight / Stephenie Meyer | 1.47 |
| 7 | (not posted) | The Taqwacores / Michael Muhammad Knight | 1.45 |
| 8 | (not posted) | Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice: 4th Edition / Charles E. Bressler | 1.41 |
| 9 | (not posted) | How to Lie with Statistics / Darrell Huff | 1.23 |
| 10 | 6 | Better Homes and Gardens Biggest Book of Casseroles | 1.14 |
| 11 | 4 | Fahrenheit 451: 50th Anniversary Ed. / Ray Bradbury | 1.02 |
| 11 | (not posted) | Boy: Tales of Childhood / Roald Dahl | 1.02 |
Last year, 8 of the top 12 were very recent posts (within 4 months of posting). This year, only 4 are very recent, and I suspect those will drop as time passes, and 2 more are less than a year old. Of last year’s list, four failed to hold an audience at all. Two more (Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, and The Philip K. Dick Reader) saw about the same number of views every day. They still dropped off the list because other reviews jumped more.
So what’s driving these numbers? First off, I’m pretty sure it’s not the quality of my writing or reviewing. Most of these are what I consider middle of the road quality reviews. As in, compared to my reviews, these are nothing special. Compared to professional reviewers, they are mulch.
The biggest thing is getting links, of course. That’s what drove the Mankiw textbook, The Feminine Mystique, Joe Abercrombie’s Before They Are Hanged, and Jay Lake’s Mainspring. Greg Mankiw stumbled across last year’s version of this list, and then posted a link to my review of his text. I kinda suspect he was surprised that anyone but a lecturer would write a review of a textbook. Traffic that day was about the same as all my traffic since I started the blog combined. There was some blowover effect on some other economics books. Abercrombie and Lake linked to reviews of their books as well. The Feminine Mystique review got a few links from other book bloggers.
Second driving force? Pictures. For some reason, the cover of Ben Bernanke’s Essays on the Great Depression is a page one result for Google image searches on the Great Depression. With the economic situation having gone downhill over the last year, it’s been compared to the Great Depression a lot, and searches increased. The hits on Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink were driven by Google image searches for women wearing boots. Though the picture in that review is tasteful, I’m pretty sure I know what the men running that search are looking for.
Third driving force? School books not normally reviewed. Aside from Mankiw’s link, significant traffic for that review comes from university students looking for information about the text. Same thing with Bressler’s Literary Criticism, and the Communist Manifesto.
Anyway, I suspect no one cares but me. But that’s all it takes to get into my blog.
