It’s been one year today since I installed a decent statistics package for this web site. So I thought I would take the opportunity to check the status of what I’ve written.
The top ten reviews are:
I noticed the macroeconomics textbook getting hits in August, coming primarily from universities. It’s an older edition, so I suspect the newer edition hits get sucked up by Amazon. I am seeing something similar on the hits to Fahrenheit 451. The Feminine Mystique and the Abercrombie books show up because they’ve been linked by more popular people. What was surprising was what didn’t show up: Silk Road to Ruin. That got a huge number of hits early last year but almost zilch after the first couple of months after the author linked to the review. There’s a front-loaded bias to hits after someone else links here, but usually I see sporadic hits on the long tail. Very little on the Ted Rall book though.
Which brings me to my second table. Something that’s been up longer has more time for people to find it. So I averaged the hits over the number of days since the review was published (or 1 year ago whichever is later). The result is an even higher bias toward more recently published reviews than I thought. Here are those results:
I suspect that Middlesex and Lift Every Voice will drop precipitously as they are very recently posted and the recency bias is pretty heavy. In fact, other than the Mankiw book and The Blade Itself, this measure is all books reviewed in the last 4 months. I need to go review my statistics textbooks to see what figure could be used to predict long term viability for these kinds of distributions.
Anyway, I suspect no one cares but me. But that’s all it takes to get into my blog.
2 Comments
You have some great stats there - I use Google Analytics to see what’s happening on my blog but it’s not as detailed as this
I’ve got both Wordpress.com stats as well as Google Analytics. GA is more detailed, but I didn’t put that in until July, so I don’t have a full year yet.
The second table isn’t provided by either of those services though. I took the numbers from table 1 (including all rows though), put them into a spreadsheet, and included the internal information to get time since posted. Basically, that’s a manual job.