Brothers-Brick.com turned three a couple days ago, and as our regular readers will have noticed over the last 24 hours, solid growth has resulted in a few new growing pains (thankfully since resolved). We appreciate all of you who’ve stuck with us over the years, and stay tuned for more great LEGO creations and LEGO news in 2010!
I hereby dedicate this post to all you stat-monkeys out there.
| 2009 stats | 2008 stats |
|---|---|
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(Implementing our Terms of Service and requiring registration back in January 2009 have had a clear effect on the number of comments — both spam and friendly — that posts received in 2009. We’ll evaluate whether the significant drop in discussion was worth it and revisit that decision in the coming weeks.)
There are Brothers-Brick.com readers in 207 countries and regions around the world:
As we’d hoped, we’ve added half a dozen or so readers in central Africa, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Still no North Korea or Turkmenistan…
Here are a few of my favorite lists, based on statistics from this past year:
| Top Countries | Top Keywords | Referring Sites |
|---|---|---|
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Like 2008, nearly all of our most popular posts in the past year have been news items (driven mainly by search engine traffic):
- Zombie Apocafest 2008
- Howl’s Moving LEGO Castle
- 10193 Medieval Market Village
- Pictures of 2010 LEGO sets at festival RFFL
- First pictures of 2009 LEGO sets
- LEGO and Brickstructures present LEGO Architecture
- Angus MacLane’s LEGO Wall-E (and interview)
- 2009 LEGO Star Wars box art
- The crazy steampunk machine
- Should LEGO release modern military sets?
Finally, here are some links to historical posts:
Netherlands on si-ix, lalalala.
Grats anyway :P
For longest time I’ve had problems leaving comments, I was able to log in, but then when I’d go back to the page to leave a comment, it would still say I needed to log in to leave a comment. I wonder if other registered members had that problem also. I could see that also putting a dent in the real comments for 2009.
Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, North Korea, Western Sahara, Chad, Central African Republic, Zambia, Somalia, and Republic of the Congo here we come!
How many of those gaps are actually because some of those countries web infrastructure is through neighboring countries? This isn’t a thorn in my side or anything, just curious.
Congratulations on turning three! I have been a regular visitor of your site since I recently got back into building with Lego bricks. The news and creations that you post have provided useful ideas for my own work. All my best for your site in 2010!
Congratulations B-B on another successful year. You guys do the hard work out of sorting the wheat from the chaff and make the site an essential daily destination.
The only improvement I can think of is for you to feature more of my MOCs ;-)
There are LEGO fans out there in central Africa — Brickset received 10 visits from Congo, 11 from Zambia and 6 from Chad in 2009 :-)
Huw
Brickset.com
congratulations to the best damn LEGO blog and the coolest group of people you could ever want to meet!
Now, the true seasonal highlight is, of course, April Fools. You don’t know how much I’m looking forward to the 2010 edition. My kids and I will keep checking in daily until then… and after. Congrats!
Curtis: I had that exact same problem, and it was the reason I didn’t comment for a long time even after I finally resigned myself to having to register. The trick is that you have to click through to the article by the permalink in the title, not the “x Comments” link. Unfortunately WordPress seems to attract coders who are so bad they really ought to stick to writing “Hello World” apps for Facebook, and their code is routinely broken at any number of blogs I read.
As a matter of principle, I /loathe/ required registration. Frankly there are hundreds of blogs I read, and it’s neither realistic nor worth the trouble to be expected to register at every single one of them. Most of the time I won’t bother. I finally did here only because there was a specific post on which I really wanted to comment, but I would not be surprised if you’re losing a huge portion of your community activity because of it.
Internet usage as percentage of population:
Chad – 1.17%
Turkmenistan – 1.14%
Tajikistan – 7.2%
North Korea – 0%
Western Sahara – .eh is reserved, but not used
Zambia – 5.55%
Somalia – 1.13%
Central African Republic – 0.43%
Republic of Congo – 4.29%
(source – World Bank development indicators, 2007 & 2008)
I think Tajikistan might come around. They have just passed the 50% mark in percentage of homes with telecommunication service, and their internet usage was expected to grow to 10% by now.
These numbers might be shocking. There are probably more people in my apartment complex with internet access than in some of these countries. Please think about that if you’re praying for world peace over the holidays.
CAR = approx 19000 internet users. You must live in a big apartment block, or are you comparing with North Korea?
It’s about F#%^ing time! I’ve been sooo frustrated with wordpress, and it turns out all I had to do was use IE to view this page and try to log in. I’ve been using Chrome for a while now, and every time I’ve tried to log in over the last few months I’ve been denied with some message about “not having sufficient permissions to access the page”. Still, if I have to start using IE I may not comment too much.
Sorry my first post is as a complainer, but I wonder if similar issues aren’t also responsible for some of your drop in readership. I visit other blogs that don’t require registration, but do have a captcha to fill out before posting -would too much spam get by one of those?
Anyhows, thanks for the site, it’s a daily stop for me.
Ha, guess who can’t edit his profile? Insufficient permissions again! There’s no way I’ll be leaving more comments unless I can change my password to something I can remember, rather than the gibberish that is the automatically-generated password. I’ll keep reading the site, and I’ll just comment on people’s flickr pages directly like I have been, rather than leaving comments here. (which might also explain some of the drop in commentors?)
Ps Mods, feel free to delete this and not show it on the main page, just thought you should know the issues I’m having.
Wow, Alaska has that many readers? ;)
I’m confused. I thought this was when the Brothers-Brick turned three?
Tim, I was exaggerating for effect. There’s probably only 600 people in my apartment complex. But I bet at least 400 of them have internet access.
^^ There’s the domain birthday and the blog birthday. Twice yearly roundups.
Well I just got really curious and nerdy so…
And here are the top 10 countries by visits.
US 2.34M 7.70
UK 318K 5.18
Canada 274K 8.23
Germany 142K 1.73
Australia 137K 6.40
Netherlands 124K 7.56
France 111K 1.79
Poland 55.9K 1.47
Italy 55.5K 0.927
Japan 54.0K 0.423
The second number is visits per 1000 people. The Canadians are our most diligent readers but special congratulations has to go to the Netherlands who manage to beat everyone but the US and Canada while not actually speaking English natively.
Now I’m all curious about per capita visits by country.
^ Ah, the joy of thinking after typing. Per capita is exactly what the second number is. Doh!
^ technically it’s per kilocapita
Out of curiosity — and to better compare/contrast the amount of comments left each year — how many blog entires were posted this year, as opposed to last year?
^ The Archives heading over on the right has those numbers. ;-)
HBD BB
Hey Andrew, do the stats come in a form that can be sliced-and-diced? Imagine a heat map breaking hits down by post theme versus time of day (“90% of castle fans visit at 3am!”). I’m thinking text file or Excel file or something like that. My company loves to blog about visualizations of fun data sets.
Love this site I originally found you guys through a Apocafest search and I’ve checked in ever day since ^__^
“[…]but special congratulations has to go to the Netherlands who manage to beat everyone but the US and Canada while not actually speaking English natively.”
Not natively, but English is a mandatory language class every High School student has to follow. Not everybody will be equally good at it, but most of “us” speak at least enough to direct an Englishman to a Tourist Information Centre, or such.
Anyway, happy birthday!
And I am still surprised Nuklearpower.com is on your referral list.
^ I know you all speak some level of English and the languages are also conveniently similar in the written form but still… that’s a lot of readers. I think that the Netherlands probably has the highest percentage of AFOLs of any country given the size of the two AFOL groups there.
Huh, seems like the site already turned three once…
^ earlier in the thread gambort says:
“^^ There’s the domain birthday and the blog birthday. Twice yearly roundups.”
^
Ah, I somehow missed that one…my apologies, Tim.
[still seems a tad funny to me at any rate ; ) ]
Dont forget you Turkey reader! Me! I have been following your blog for about 2 months, and I love it! Keep On going TBB!