#top15 — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Nicola Griffith @[email protected] · 2025-12-30 · 21:00 UTC

2025 Blog Stats

Overview

Like last year, the number of people who came to read something on this site was higher than the average for the last eleven years—but down 0.5% from last year’s record high. Those numbers, of course, come nowhere near close to the numbers I used to get at Ask Nicola in the heyday of blogging, but given the advent and then rise of social media, these numbers feel pretty good.
I posted more often—120 posts, including the end-of-year roundup coming tomorrow—though a large number were brief and informational: notices of events and appearances, links to interviews, con reports, and so on.
I did a reasonable number of thinking-aloud posts, such as The Day the Nazis Died and Resistance ≠ Futile, plus the usual personal-moments entries, such as Shock. Joy. And O. My. God! and Some thoughts About Post-Viral Syndromes.

Where you came from

2025

Image description: Map of the world showing density of visitors by country. The USA is coloured dark blue, the UK a mid-blue, and most of the rest of the world a pale blue—with some countries (mainly in central Africa and the far north) showing blank.

As you can see, people come from a lot of countries. The Top 3 countries from where my readers log on haven’t changed at all from last year, but the rest played musical chairs, with South Korea dropping off the Top 10 list and being replaced by Sweden.

US
UK
Canada
Germany
Australia
Netherlands
Ireland
France
Sweden
India

How you got here

Referrers

As usual the vast majority of you got here via web search. I was delighted to see how much impact Bluesky is having—it’s currently my favourite social media hangout—and for the first time Threads makes the list. Wikipedia continues to be a useful source—I did clean up the main NG entry a little, though there are still quite a few errors and omissions, but I just don’t have time for the individual books pages. If anyone out there is looking for a nifty project, well, there you go. (The critical response part of the main page is just terrible—really fucking sad—some of my books don’t even have pages, and the ones that do have got a lot wrong.)

search engines
Facebook
Bluesky
LinkedIn
WordPress
Threads
Wikipedia

Browsers

Again, Chrome was the most popular. In fact, this list hasn’t changed at all from last year.

Chrome
Safari
Other
Firefox
Edge

Search terms, screen sizes, and operating systems

The search terms themselves were very boring: my name and its variants, mainly, with some book titles or characters, with a few disability-related terms and one or two Old English words. Overall though, there were disappointingly few amusements to be found, unlike, say, 2010 on Ask Nicola.

The screen sizes you used to get here stayed in the same order but the percentage changes were significant—last year, mobile was over 60% but this year desktop was close to half:

Mobile—49%
Desktop—48%
Tablet—3%

The OS order stayed the same: iOS beating out Android by a wide margin, Windows only just edging out Mac, Linux trailing and iPad falling back into the rest of the also-rans.

iPhone
Windows
Mac
Android
Linux

What you liked when you got here

This year once again I didn’t talk much about the cats (except Charlie’s run-in with a bird of prey and his resulting sartorial choices)—there was too much other stuff going on. I did post photos of them a fair bit on social media. I radically reduced the posts about H5N1 because there was little that was truly new to report.

Top 15 New Post and Pages

Usually here I only talk about Posts, but this time I want to include new Pages.* In 2025, more posts than usual were either virally (literally about viruses✤) or politically orientated, while the rest were mostly writing-related, whether about specific books or personal triumphs related to books. For the first time since we got them, none of the top results were about our cats, Charlie and George:

Top 15 Posts Overall

The Top 15 most-visited posts this year were a bit different—fewer than a quarter (26.6%) were new,* and of the perennial favourites, two bangers of the past—Lame is So Gay, Huge New: MS is a Metabolic Disorder—have slid so far down the rankings they’ve almost vanished, whereas it’s clear we have a new heavyweight champion, The Paradox of Tolerance. Given the current administration and Congress, this does not surprise me:

Top 10 Pages

But of course posts aren’t the only landing sites. People seem to use several of my Pages quite a bit, so this year I’ll break out the Top 10 Pages in a separate category. You’ll be shocked—shocked!—to learn that these are mostly about books or about me. (And I was tickled to find my PhD thesis also got some love.) In the interests of space, I lumped together those who arrived via ‘Nicola Griffith’ and ‘Bio’ and ‘About’ into one (because they all feed into the same page), and left out the general Books page in favour of specific book pages. I admit to being a bit wistful that no matter how I slice and dice the numbers, Slow River doesn’t get much traffic. (However! All is not lost! I’l have some news on the front soon.)

Looking ahead in terms of this site

Headline: the same as last year—this blog is not going anywhere; I’m here to stay.

For several years, traffic to my posts dropped steadily—and, for a few years, precipitously. Most obviously, though: readers stopped leaving comments. If I was not also on various social media platforms I might have felt as though I were shouting into the void. But what was (and is) happening was that people were talking about the posts, just not here. They left brief notes on Bluesky, and Mastodon, and Facebook, and—to a much lesser extent—Instagram. But five years ago, early in the pandemic, the number of visitors to this site stabilised, and then 3 years ago started going up. This year the numbers are almost as high as last year—which was a record, the best ever for this WordPress iteration of my site, which has now been up 11 years. (Hmmm. Probably time for a redesign. There are just always so many other things to do…) The number of comments has also stabilised—as I type this I have almost exactly the same number as last year, which means after this post and the next go up, I will have more than last year, though—like the visitor numbers—they’re just a fraction of what they were before social media.

(FYI, this year I sadly neglected my research website, Gemæcce. I posted there only four times this year, yet 2025 had the second highest number of visitors since the WordPress site began.)

My guess is that this is a reflection of what’s been happening with social media: a continuing fragmentation and loss of centre, plus the ever-increasing thicket of trolls and bot-based lifeforms, not to mention the barbed bramble of adverts blocking the path to conversation. Blogs like this, with no advertising, can be a haven of calm.

However, it’s also a reflection of the different ways I’m using different platforms. Specifically, when in the past I might have posted about a review or a particularly nifty photo of Charlie or George, now I’ll post those on Instagram (which automagically shares with Facebook). When I get momentarily incensed about some political buffoonery, I tend to post on Bluesky And then, of course, there’s Patreon.

On Patreon I wrote over 60 posts, and some were very long—such as the post about What I’m working on, and the one about a seventh-century battle. Some would have been perfect for this blog (or my research blog) but as I’m running Patreon to bring in the money to pay for independent publicists in an on-going effort to break down the walls surrounding my various literary gardens (Aud in one, Hild in another, SFF in yet another, and disability fiction in yet another other) that is a considered choice. I’ll just remind you that some of those posts are available to everyone, members or not; quite a few to members who join for free; and probably only about half are reserved for those who pay as little as $3 a month. And here’s the thing: it’s working! Those independent publicists along with the ones working for my publishers have scored some coups this year—including a… Well, I’ll be talking about that very soon! Stay tuned 😎.

I’m relatively content with the new equilibrium. I enjoy writing the posts and people seem to enjoy reading them. So I’m not going anywhere: this blog is here to stay. Xitter’s implosion has made no discernible difference to my traffic—I deleted my profile there nearly two years ago with no regrets—but is, rather, another demonstration of why we all, and creators in particular, need to own our own platforms. Even if I thought all those other social platforms really were being run as public utilities for the greater good (ha ha ha), I like being able to say things too long for Bluesky (currently my favourite) or Mastodon and not pretty enough for Instagram. This is the best place to do that. This site is my permanent archive; if there’s something you need to know about me, my fiction, my essays, events, disability, and so on, the odds are high that a simple search of this site will find it for you, right here. (If you read posts on a desktop, you’ll find the search box at the top of the right sidebar. If you’re reading on your phone, you’ll find it both in the top right, opposite the menu bar, and at the end of every post.)

Will I start a newsletter (or post on Medium or Substack)? No. For the simple reason that this blog functions as a newsletter. All you have to do is subscribe (in desktop view, just look at the top of the right hand sidebar; in mobile platforms, scroll right to the end of an individual post), and every new post will be delivered directly to your mailbox the minute it’s published. No muss, no fuss—just like any other newsletter, except that a) you don’t have to pay, you will never have to pay, b) I’ll never share your data with anyone for any reason, c) there will be no adverts. Plus, on a blog you can talk back if you like, safe in the knowledge that I’m in full control of the comments. Speaking of which, I’ve set my posts to close comments after 28 days. If you come across an old post and really want to comment, just contact me via the Contact form (which where you’ll also find links to my literary, film and TV, legal, and speaking representatives) and we’ll figure it out.

Right now I have no particular plans for big changes here. I like this blog; I’ve been doing this or something like this for 30 years. I still enjoy it. So hopefully I’ll see you around.

#2025 #blogStats #blogTraffic #newsletter #top15

#blogstats #blogtraffic #newsletter #top15

Nicola Griffith @[email protected] · 2025-12-30 · 21:00 UTC

2025 Blog Stats

Overview

Like last year, the number of people who came to read something on this site was higher than the average for the last eleven years—but down 0.5% from last year’s record high. Those numbers, of course, come nowhere near close to the numbers I used to get at Ask Nicola in the heyday of blogging, but given the advent and then rise of social media, these numbers feel pretty good.
I posted more often—120 posts, including the end-of-year roundup coming tomorrow—though a large number were brief and informational: notices of events and appearances, links to interviews, con reports, and so on.
I did a reasonable number of thinking-aloud posts, such as The Day the Nazis Died and Resistance ≠ Futile, plus the usual personal-moments entries, such as Shock. Joy. And O. My. God! and Some thoughts About Post-Viral Syndromes.

Where you came from

2025

Image description: Map of the world showing density of visitors by country. The USA is coloured dark blue, the UK a mid-blue, and most of the rest of the world a pale blue—with some countries (mainly in central Africa and the far north) showing blank.

As you can see, people come from a lot of countries. The Top 3 countries from where my readers log on haven’t changed at all from last year, but the rest played musical chairs, with South Korea dropping off the Top 10 list and being replaced by Sweden.

US
UK
Canada
Germany
Australia
Netherlands
Ireland
France
Sweden
India

How you got here

Referrers

As usual the vast majority of you got here via web search. I was delighted to see how much impact Bluesky is having—it’s currently my favourite social media hangout—and for the first time Threads makes the list. Wikipedia continues to be a useful source—I did clean up the main NG entry a little, though there are still quite a few errors and omissions, but I just don’t have time for the individual books pages. If anyone out there is looking for a nifty project, well, there you go. (The critical response part of the main page is just terrible—really fucking sad—some of my books don’t even have pages, and the ones that do have got a lot wrong.)

search engines
Facebook
Bluesky
LinkedIn
WordPress
Threads
Wikipedia

Browsers

Again, Chrome was the most popular. In fact, this list hasn’t changed at all from last year.

Chrome
Safari
Other
Firefox
Edge

Search terms, screen sizes, and operating systems

The search terms themselves were very boring: my name and its variants, mainly, with some book titles or characters, with a few disability-related terms and one or two Old English words. Overall though, there were disappointingly few amusements to be found, unlike, say, 2010 on Ask Nicola.

The screen sizes you used to get here stayed in the same order but the percentage changes were significant—last year, mobile was over 60% but this year desktop was close to half:

Mobile—49%
Desktop—48%
Tablet—3%

The OS order stayed the same: iOS beating out Android by a wide margin, Windows only just edging out Mac, Linux trailing and iPad falling back into the rest of the also-rans.

iPhone
Windows
Mac
Android
Linux