Lately I came across a post titled “What kind of normal person still writes a blog?”, and it pushed me to look back over the traffic data from the past couple of months. Earlier this year, my site also got included in a few subscription collections, so this feels like a good excuse to talk about what traffic really looks like for a personal blog.
Right now I mainly maintain three sites: a homepage, a personal blog, and a knowledge wiki. Two of them have traffic analytics enabled, and the numbers are, honestly, pretty rough.
People who visit often may not have paid much attention to the homepage. The top-level domain is used as a site directory, while the blog lives on a subdomain.
Homepage
The homepage traffic is bleak enough that “mostly ignored” would be a fair description.
Most of the visits are probably from myself, a few long-time friends, and some former university classmates dropping by now and then.
The domain name is amusing in its own way too. Some friends in college used to joke that my brain had “gone watt,” and since wate.com was already taken, I just threw in a lucky number and ended up with 7wate.com as the main domain.
Blog
The overall trend is pretty clear: most of the traffic came from getting included in a few subscription bundles this year. The rest mostly came from other bloggers linking over. Riding along on everyone’s daily one-liners turns out to be a decent little traffic trick.
Looking at visitor locations, the largest share comes from major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou.
On desktop, Microsoft still dominates, with a small scattering of Linux users here and there. I’ve actually been tempted to switch my own work setup over to Linux too—Windows really gives people plenty to complain about.
On mobile, iPhone users make up the largest group, followed by Huawei and Xiaomi, which is more or less in line with general phone sales rankings.
Baidu can now index and surface the site properly, so things are basically fine on that front. Because of that, I’m not planning to keep doing detailed visitor info statistics.
In the end, the best way to put it is still this: a blog is basically a utility pole, so of course people are going to leave random marks on it.
Feel free to stop by and leave yours.
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