After the first year of blogging, I will now take a brief look at the traffic patterns of the blog. In other words, this will be a rather boring post with lots of names and numbers, but I promise I will soon get back with some “real” stuff. After all, there are plenty of darks clouds on the horizon these days…

So, you may ask yourself, how did I get here? Chances are, you either found this site through a search engine or by stumbling upon a link on Twitter. These two together accounted for over a third of all traffic, or around 11,500 views, with a rough 50-50 split between them. The next tier of referrers consists of Facebook and Random Thoughts, which also generated more or less the same amount of traffic, but in the span of 1,100-1,300 views.

These constituted the far largest groups, but a number of interesting smaller referrers can also be mentioned. Amongst the forums, Swedish forum Soldf.com narrowly beat Finnish Maanpuolustus.net by 171-168, and I have no idea why Spacebattles.com is the third largest forum in this category. Austrian Der Standard was largest contributing media/newspaper, contributing 182 views.

Finnish Institute of International Affairs also made a slight contribution to my traffic, as did Reddit and Zeit.de.

And where did you go next? To Wikipedia, of course! The second tier in clicks is made up by Swedish blogger Oplatsen, Twitter, and Finnish blogger Lt.(N) James Mashiri and his abovementioned Random Thoughts. Swedish boatyard Dockstavarvet managed to get seventh place overall, and first amongst companies, with 123 clicks. Amongst defence companies, British BMT Group had almost half that amount, with AgustaWestland, Airbus Helicopters, Damen, and Russian Pella Shipyards all having 34-28 clicks each. Saab was only mentioned towards the end of the year, and as such managed 11 clicks.

Of the rest, AIS-viewer Marine Traffic narrowly missed top-five, being sixth overall with 137 clicks. Amongst bloggers, Oplatsen and Random Thoughts were followed by Cornucopia?, Wiseman’s Wisdoms and Jägarchefen, all three being Swedish. The abovementioned Finnish Institute of International Affairs received a fair amount of clicks, with 63 in total.

All in all, I must say I am surprised by the small amounts of clicks. As I personally like to check the source for statements made in written texts, be it in books, blogs, Wikipedia, or some other forum, it is interesting to notice that this does not seem to be the case for the average reader. Many of the clicks are also not source-checking per se, but rather links to further reading. In this second category falls e.g. most of the links to Wikipedia, which I often link to when I mention certain vehicles and systems that I can assume that not all readers are familiar with (S-75 Dvina was the most popular one btw).

By this time, the question, “where am I?”, might come to mind. During the better part of the year, Finnish and Swedish visitors were surprisingly equal in numbers, but towards the very end of the year the number of Finnish visitors rose slightly, and by the end of the year the blog had had 9148 Finnish visitors compared to 7182 Swedish. United States (3454 visitors) and the United Kingdoms (1296 visitors) where the other two countries with more than 1000 visitors. After this follows a number of countries in more or less the expected order, with perhaps the most interesting exception to the anticipated order being that Puerto Rico (276 visitors) beat Estonia (230 visitors). Clearly, I am not as connected to the Estonian #Julpo(?)-scene the way I would like to be. After all, in the same way as is the case with Sweden, the decisions Estonia takes in this field directly affects us as neighbours.