: Sometime this evening, probably around eight o'clock, diamond geezer will receive its fifteen millionth visitor. More accurately it'll be the fifteen millionth time that an archaic stats package has registered a unique visit, which very much isn't the same thing, but I think still very much worth celebrating.
Fifteen million visits is an astonishing total - the equivalent of everyone in the Netherlands reading my blog once. But viewed another way it's not much - on average three busy tube trains of readers a day.
What I do know is that my audience has been coming faster.
The first million took five and a half years.
The last million's taken eleven months.
For the first decade and a half the graph was a curve because my readership was (gradually) growing, with the fastest spurt in the pre-Olympic heyday of 2011/2012. But since 2018 it's become much more of a straight line because my readership's levelled out, with each successive million taking about approximately one year.
That's good because it means I'm not haemorrhaging readers, but also bad because I'm no longer gaining a wider audience like I used to. What I seem to have is a long-standing core readership, cheers, with a few new regulars who somehow stumble here balanced by others drifting away. In a resolutely post-blog era it could be a lot worse.
However the jump from 14 million to 15 million is the first time a million's taken longer to reach than the million before. What's more my stats package suggests a number of these so-called visitors have been 'bad bots', zapping in to crawl my content and digest it elsewhere. It's less than 5% of the total but enough that the 15 million milestone would otherwise have been reached in June, not May. It all suggests that the number of humans reading this blog is alas going down, indeed diamond geezer may have peaked.
Each time one of these millionaire milestones rolls by I like to look back and analyse which sites my readers have arrived from. For the first ten years this meant a league table of top linking blogs, ordered by volume of visitors clicking here from there. This used to be hugely important back in the era when blogs thrived solely because other blogs linked to them, but times change.
Blogs no longer have a fraction of the traction they enjoyed a decade ago now that social media is king, because the ability to drive traffic has shifted away from those who generate their own content towards those who merely digest the content of others. I've thus had to broaden this category to all forms of social media including Twitter, Facebook etc.
Here then is the latest update of my Top 10 linkers across the last 24 years, i.e. 2002-2026.
Twitter is top by miles with over 10% of all blog referrals. And that's old-school Twitter, not Elon Musk's X variant which has become tumbleweed, thus my @diamondgzrblog account now generates minimal interaction. Reddit is second with 5% of referrals, none of it my doing, instead courtesy of kindly souls who suggest I've written something interesting and very occasionally a lot of people turn up. They used to turn up more often before most of London's tube geeks were siphoned off into a minor subreddit, so its second place is again mostly a reflection of past supernovae.
The first proper blog appears at number 3, the inimitable Ian Visits who's kindly nudged visitors my way for well over ten years, especially as part of his Friday rail news round-up. Hacker News are an American aggregator portal who've only sent people here a dozen times but in such huge numbers that they're fourth. Facebook is a mystery because I'm not on there but people must still be posting links to the blog on a fairly regular basis. The rest of the top 10 includes two London-based behemoths, two blogs that went quiet years ago and Feedly, an RSS portal whose readers come here (I suspect) mainly to read the comments.
Before you get the wrong idea I should say the vast majority of my fifteen million readers didn't click in from anywhere, they rely on force of habit. I've hit this milestone by being reliable rather than clickable, because there'll almost certainly be a new post to read every morning which hopefully you'll want to read. As far as I can tell at least 90% of you currently arrive off your own bat, not because something elsewhere directed you here... although that's probably how you ended up at diamond geezer in the first place.
Also I know that a lot of you read the blog without actually visiting it, courtesy of my RSS feed, which makes a mockery of attempting to count visitor numbers anyway. I probably passed fifteen million several months ago, maybe even years back, but didn't realise.
So I don't mind where my fifteen million came from, nor that I can't count you all, I'm just well chuffed that you still bother turning up. Thanks to all of you, and here's to millions more...
