Thursday, December 29, 2022

Top 40 Most Viewed Posts in 2022 on Genea-Musings

 A)  Here are the Top 40 viewed Genea-Musings blog posts from 2022 that had the most page views in 2022 (from View Count statistics on the Google Blogger Posts page as of 29 December 2022):

1)  2172 Views:  Ancestry Raising Subscription Prices Effective 1 February 2022 - Updated (posted 6 January 2022)
2)  1192 views:  The State of the 1950 United States Census - 3 April 2022 (posted 3 April 2022)
3)  1028 views:  AncestryDNA Introduces DNA Chromosome Painter (posted 20 July 2022)

7)  694 views:  My 23 Known Revolutionary War Soldiers (posted 4 July 2022)
10) 646 views:  RootsMagic Family Tree Software Updated to Version 8.2.0 (posted 28 June 2022)

15)  577 views:  First Look At Ancestry and Photomyne Photo Enhancements (posted 3 March 2022)

19)  557 views:  Another Hiatus in Genea-Musings - I'm in the Hospital (posted 27 May 2022)

24)  504 views:  First Look at the MyHeritage LiveStory Feature (posted 3 March 2022)


31)  438 views:  #MyAncestryStory Debuts on the Ancestry Mobile app (posted 1 March 2022)
34) 427 views:  Will the AncestryDNA Ethnicity Estimate Ever Settle Down? (posted 17 April 2022)

36)  408  views:  Ancestry Releases an Early Version of the 1950 U.S. Census Index (posted 4 May 2022)
38)  404 views:  COVID-19 Has Infected Genea-Musings (posted 5 December 2022)

Why 40?   Because I knew my blog posts views were down this year because of a general falloff in number of blog posts, stale weekly topics, then the Feedburner loss, plus my health problems.  So I listed 300 or more views and cut it back to 40, which happened at 400 views.

Genea-Musings had about 975,000 page views according to Google during 2022, and about 14.1 million views since 2007.  In 2021, Genea-Musings had about 1.5 million page views, so the effect of all my excuses above was about a 33% drop in page views for 2022.  

B)  The ten most popular Genea-Musings posts since 2007 (per Google Blogger) are:

1)  Microfilm Scanning at the FHL and FHC (posted 22 July 2009) - 76,910 views.
2)  1940 Census Enumeration District Maps Online at NARA Website (posted 18 July 2011) - 72,200 views.
3)  Genealogy Presentations on Slideshare.net (posted 28 January 2010) - 25,940 views.

4)  Dear Ancestry.com: Are You Fixing These Problems? (17 January 2019) - 17,000 views
5)  World records for number of children (posted 21 July 2006) - 15,700 views.

6)  Merry Christmas to All! (posted 25 December 2011) - 14,900 views.
7)  Randy's NGS 2010 Photos - Post 1 (posted 4 May 2010) - 9,350 views
8)  RootsTech 2017 Blog Compendium -- UPDATED (posted 1 March 2017) - 8212 views

9)  Ancestry.com Says They Will Work on Technical Problems (posted 11 May 2018) - 7910 views
10)  Book Review: "The Spyglass File," by Nathan Dylan Goodwin (posted  29 September 2016) -- 6,410 views

These 10 haven't changed in the last year, except #5 and #6 switched places.

C)  Of course, all of my blog posts are viewed by more readers than those that go to the specific web page for the post, which is what Google counts - those who read them on a Genea-Musings archive page, those that read them in an RSS reader, or on a mobile device.  In July 2022, Feedburner stopped their daily email service to subscribers, and I have not found an acceptable substitute yet.

Another measure of popularity or readership might be in the number of comments generated by each post.  I don't think that is a reliable measure of popularity because of the proliferation of RSS reader usage, email usage, and mobile device usage, each of which require one or more click throughs to get to the comment box.  In addition, there are thousands of spam comments in the list (now Google doesn't block them and I'm too lazy to review them and delete them every day).

It certainly seems like readers search for Ancestry.com, Findmypast, DNA, Dear Randy, Rabbit Holes, and genealogy software topics, and find my blog posts.  In recent years, some of my research posts - Amanuensis Monday, 52 Ancestors, Treasure Chest Thursday, etc. -- have made the Top 40 list.

D)  Previous "most popular" posts on Genea-Musings are:


E)  Readership of Genea-Musings went down significantlyover the past year - the Feedburner suspension did not help!  For example, the 10th most viewed post last year had 646 views, the 20th most viewed post had 544 views, the 30th had 441 views, and the 40th had 401 views. Last year, the 10th most viewed post had 1045 views, the 20th had 861 views, the 30th had 808 views and the 40th had 714 views.  

Google says that there were 975 thousand page views for Genea-Musings in 2022, and 14.1 million page views all time (since 2007).  These numbers include views of "Pages" on Genea-Musings - the "Pages" link is at the top of the page.

I wrote about 825 blog posts this year, compared to over 870 for 2021, and over 900 for most years since 2007.

F)  I wondered what the least viewed Genea-Musings post was in 2022.  I know that Treasure Chest Thursday, Wordless Wednesday, Census Sunday, and Seavers in the News posts are not that popular.  The least viewed blog post in 2022 (to date) had 53 views.

=================================================


Copyright (c) 2022, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

No comments: