2012 in Review

About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year.  This blog was viewed about 760,000 times in 2012.  If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 14 years for that many people to see it.  -  WordPress.com presents The Honest Courtesan 2012 in blogging

WordPress is just wonderful for someone who revels in organization as I do; as I explained in last year’s review column,

…the statistics page displays a bar graph of page views (with tabs to view it in days, weeks or months); a running total of both daily and all-time views…for the blog as a whole and breaking it down by post and page; numbers and links of all sites and searches which bring visitors to the blog; and the number of clicks on links in my blog (with all figures broken down by day, week, month, quarter, year and all time)…

Last year, international visitors were grouped only by continent, and then only in the annual report; since February 25^th, it’s broken down by country on my normal statistics page.  The annual year-end report was released on New Year’s Eve, and on top of that I’d like to share some “top ten” numbers as I did last year.

I received a total of 762,210 visitors in 2012; the average number of hits per day was 2082, but it was much higher in the second half of the year.  My best month was July, with a total of 94,145 views (3037 per day) and my best day was September 26^th, with a total of 8277 views in a single day (thanks to someone featuring a link to “Saint Nicholas” on Reddit).  That site gave me the fifth-greatest number of referrals for the year, 3883 in all; it was exceeded by Twitter (15,190 hits), The Agitator (10,598), Facebook (5570) and Google Reader (4828).  #6 was Popehat with 2117, #7 Feministe (“The Many Types of Prostitutes in Ancient Rome”) with 1558, #8 Psychology Today  (Satoshi Kanazawa’s “Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes?”) with 1143, #9 A Voice for Men with 876 and #10 The Atlantic (“The White Savior Industrial Complex“) with 767.  The top ten countries in which my readers live together account for roughly 78% of all of my traffic; #1 is the United States (55%), #2 the United Kingdom (6.8%), #3 Canada (5.4%), #4 Australia (2.7%), #5 Germany (1.8%), #6 India (1.5%), and #7, #8, #9 and #10 France, Singapore, Italy and The Netherlands respectively, each with about 0.7%.

The most common search term which discovered this blog was “rhinoceros”, with about 13,810 hits; permutations of “the honest courtesan” were second with roughly 10,500 hits.  Third place was held by various versions of “ashley madison” (many expecting “free” credits), a total of 6112 hits; then “soapland” in many different forms for a total of 4488.  ”maggie mcneill” (spelled several different ways) produced 2764 views, followed closely by many different ways to say “vulva shapes” (2683 total).  “veronica franco” brought 2167 hits, “hells angels” 1423, “plaçage” 983 and “salvation army santas” 697.

My top ten posts for the year were as follows:

Name                                                      Date                         # of hits in 2012
A Visit to Soapland                             October 21^st, 2011                25,011
Rhinoceros                                         January 21^st, 2012                 22,199
Ashley Madison                                  January 30^th, 2011                 16,225
All Shapes and Sizes                          September 8^th, 2010              14,040
Black Men                                           September 18^th, 2010             7,472
Saint Nicholas                                     December 6^th, 2010                7,425
Meretrices and Prostibulae                 November 3^rd, 2010   6,039
A Whore in the Bedroom                     September 9^th, 2010              5,021
Veronica Franco                                  October 1^st, 2010                    4,722
None of Your Business                        October 11^th, 2011                  3,922

The top post by comment hasn’t changed much since last year:

Name                                            Date  # of comments by 12/31/12
That Is So Hot!                             April 19^th, 2011                       196
Speaking in Prostitute                  June 17^th, 2011                       171
The Enlightenment Police             October 1^st, 2011                    144
Universal Criminality                     January 15^th, 2012                  137
Pendulum                                     April 9^th, 2011                          134
Their Lips Are Moving                   April 25^th, 2011                        132
Creeping Rot                                April 18^th, 2011                        123
Public Service Announcement       June 12^th, 2011                       122
Savaging                                      March 27^th, 2011   119
Neither Cold Nor Hot                    April 6^th, 2011                          114

…and the nine top commenters (after myself) were Sailor Barsoom with 2822, Krulac with 1015, Laura with 919, C. Andrew 599, Asehpe 539,  Comixchik 502, Gorbachev 479, Aspasia 273 and Kewilson 189.

Well, that’s about it; I’m really pleased to see the numbers increasing because it lets me know that my message is getting out all over the world.  Many of my readers have said that I inspire them to fight against prohibitionist lies, and that’s even better; the more of us are out there, telling the truth and debunking the myths, the sooner the balance will tip and governments which criminalize consensual adult behavior will be scorned for the repressive tyrannies they are.