2024 Book Blogging Stats Transparency

New year = new stats post, because we’re here to normalize talking about stats. Also stats are fun to look at sometimes — I think there’s a fine line between being obsessed with stats and then just looking at it out of curiosity. I like to say I’m the curious one, though.

(These days I haven’t been looking at stats, though.)

As with previous blogging stats transparency posts, the intention of this post isn’t to brag about numbers but rather to normalize them. And I think it’s interesting to have a long-term blogger turn out to be pretty average, lol.

Let’s dive on in to 2024’s stats! (I was planning on doing this earlier, but alas.)

Things that May Have Affected Stats

2024 started out great and completely normal. I genuinely thought the only thing I was going to say in this section was, “Nothing happened! I didn’t break anything, and nothing broke on me!” Everyone cheers, and we all live happily never ever after on this burning planet of increasing embers and crises.

May I present to you my clown shoes:

If any of you have self-hosted WordPress and use Jetpack, you might have noticed they made some… changes sometime around April or May. Namely, locking stats behind a paywall if you’re commercial, even if you don’t make a profit at all. But if you have affiliate links, KoFi, whatever it may be — you have to pay for it.

If you ask me, I think it’s a load of rotten potatoes, because I earn virtually nothing, and part of that might also be because I don’t toot my stuff around when I probably should do it more often (but Your Honor, they require energy, which I do not currently have). Mostly because I feel weird doing so, so I just chuck my KoFi in my little bio at the end of every post and occasionally chuck in some affiliate links when relevant. I just think Automattic could’ve been a bit more loose with some requirements, but I’ll get off my soapbox and continue on my merry way.

But anyway, I didn’t notice Jetpack locked stats behind their paywall, because I wasn’t paying attention to the blog all too much because of life and personal issues. I just checked it once a week casually to see if everything was working fine or if anything needed updating (because I swear, if someone hacks into my little space, I will cry. Also, when I first got internet access at home, I think it took a good 8-10+ hours for my laptop to update nearly 2+ years worth of updates. I’ve learned my lesson and will apply it accordingly to life.). And then I had to go through the forums to plead my case with the WordPress gods, so when all is said and done, I’m missing about ~ 3.5 days of stats. Not too terrible, and I’ll take losing stats information as long as the blog is still accessible.

I think this is probably a good time to remind you that while it’s kind of unrelated, with social media, you’re at the mercy of whatever platform you’re on because you don’t own it vs. blogging (self-hosting specifically). And in a similar vein, you don’t own the plugins you install on your blog (unless you make your own), so you’re at the mercy of the developers, which is what happened here.

So, do we actually need stats? Of course not, not with something most of us do as a hobby and not for a living. And if the day comes where there’s nothing that could track blog stats for me, I’ll probably just shelve the annual transparency posts and call it a day because my brain currently does not have the capacity to learn GA4. It can barely get up in the morning.

JetPack Alternatives for Stats

With that being said (I went on yet another tangent), I went searching for JetPack Alternatives, because I figured there would be no harm in finding plugins with the features from the plugin I use the most. Because if that goes down, at least I have a backup, right? Also, when you’re unemployed and miserable AF, sometimes you need to distract yourself and this was my distraction.

Some day, I hope to write a post on alternatives that I started using, but for this post, we’re only going to focus on stats plugins. And there are quite a few plugins, so I definitely suggest trying some additional ones out for yourselves and see what works best for you and your stat tracking needs. Personally, I went around looking for GA4 alternatives that were more user-friendly (some I previously tried, some I’ve never tried) but also provided similar information JetPack Stats provided for me as well.

Eventually, I narrowed it down to two plugins: Koko Analytics and WP Statistics.

Koko Analytics

Koko Analytics has a simple layout, and I personally love it. I love that you can click “Last Year’s Stats” and it’ll take you directly to it, but you can also select dates if you want years before. Unfortunately, it’s too simple for someone who posts an annual blogging stats transparency post. Koko Analytics only tracks pageviews, visitors, referrers, and top pages.

It doesn’t track audience, comments and engagement (I’m sure there’s a plugin for this one), or anything else more comprehensive. Mostly, it won’t affect the stats transparency post because while I wouldn’t be able to track comments and engagement, blog followers, and audience by country, I’ll still be able to track everything else.

It broke earlier this year, though, and while I’m sure I could figure out the issue, I just have no energy for that, so I chucked it out.

WP Statistics

WP Statistics, however, that one is as close to what I’m searching for and goes into a lot more detail. Frankly, it’s like Google Analytics before GA4 in my opinion, and it’s more user-friendly that GA. I’m not a big fan of the UI, nor do I like that I have to go through extra steps to pull up the last year’s information, but that honestly comes down to personal preferences. Personally, I think this is the closest to JetPack Stats and providing the same information in an easy to read format.

Both of these I decided to give it a test run while having JetPack in use just to see if there’s any difference in tracking. I’ll skip out on providing screenshots for both WP Statistics and JetPack this year since I didn’t use a new plugin for tracking until nearly halfway through the year, but I’ll share them next year for better comparison (unless things change, of course!).

Love that I went on an entire tangent for 1K words. I promise I mean to get down to business now! But first, did anything else change that affected stats? Not really, outside of the quantity of posts, which also affected 2023. I think the amount of posts I wrote in both years are about roughly the same, but we’ll get into that later.

Total Page Views

2024 had a total of 18,618 views, which is definitely less than what I had in 2023 with 21,459 views. For the amount of posting I did, it’s not bad at all — I expected much less.

Like I mentioned last year, most of my posts are reviews, so there’s a larger backlog of evergreen posts that consistently give traffic over the years. If I had to take a guess on what percentage I wrote in the year are evergreen and what’s more “dies on a hill in a few days” (without looking), I’d say 20%, maybe 30%.

Blog Followers and Average Page Views

2024 also had a small jump in followers, with 297 WordPress followers. It’s actually a higher jump from 2022 to 2023, which was going from 281 to 286 followers.

The average views per day also dropped last year, going from 59 in 2023 to 51 in 2024. It makes sense, though, given the total views for the year dropped as well. Like last year, I’m including the average for all the years I’ve been on self-hosted WordPress for full context.

Not too shabby, if you want my opinion. The amount of posts I wrote is about more or less equivalent to what I wrote in 2023.

Number of Posts

2023 had 22 posts written, while 2024 had 25 posts. It would actually be a lot less if I didn’t get laid off about a year ago and turned to blogging as an outlet to cope. 2023 definitely was likely riding the coattails of a particular post (not that I’ll complain! I’m genuinely happy that people are still discovering the magnificence of Love Between Fairy and Devil).

Let’s Talk Consistency

I think having a list of the total views, average daily views per month, and the number of posts written in the month really provides a full picture because we can see the patterns and compare them to find any differences that could affect consistency. And so I have a simple spreadsheet compiling all of this information in one place.

One day I do fear this will become too big to see clearly, but I think that will be a future Soph problem. I also just noticed I wrote September as having 2 posts instead of 1 in September and October. It’s not an error on JetPack given I have that set to Central and the blog set to Eastern (intentionally); October’s post was live on October 1 at midnight Eastern, but it would’ve been September 30 at 11pm Central.

I was actively posting from May-July — arguably, August can be counted as well (at least half of the month), and you can clearly tell being active does a play a part. It doesn’t happen right away in some cases — I had 7 posts in May but only 1,357 views for that month. Sometimes it’s the matter of timing — the most views in a month was in January 2024, but I had scarcely any posts during that timeframe.

So what gives?

Iron Flame was published in November 2024, and you can see my views surge a little around that time. January isn’t too late from the continuing hype of Fourth Wing’s sequel, but it does start to die down a little by the time we get to February. If I look into my stats for January 2025, you’ll likely see a higher amount of views because Onyx Storm recently released and people are going to be talking about Fourth Wing and possibly picking it up regardless of any issues surrounding the book or author as your average casual reader won’t be keeping track of that information.

In fact, even before we talk about the top posts for 2024, I just know Fourth Wing is going to be on there somewhere.

Top 5-10 Posts

I actually had to zoom this in to 90% to fit the top ten posts of 2024 because most of the pages seem to have gotten into the top?

And I’ll be listing the top five posts like last year and linking them so you can visit them if you’d like to read them.

1. Love Between Fairy and Devil (2022)
2. Meteor Garden (2018 Reboot)
3. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
4. Five Broken Blades by Mai Corland
5. Should You Blog Under a Pen Name? Why it is Absolutely Okay

One day I’ll have the energy to watch Asian dramas and write reviews for those, and eventually the top 5 spots will all be overtaken by Asian dramas that I’ll have nothing to talk about unless I talk about the top 10-20 posts. But you know what, that’s a future Soph problem and a bridge I’ll cross if I get there.

Fourth Wing moved up to the Top 3 for 2024 — it in fact swapped places with my post about pen names that I genuinely did not expect to do as well as it did (but I guess people are very passionate/curious about pen names in blogging). Five Broken Blades is a newcomer, and my guess is the hype going up toward the sequel’s release.

Iron Flame isn’t much further down, and I’ve frankly forgotten about Spinning Out just as much as I forgot about my Shadowhunters post. It’s one of those posts I wrote for poops and giggles; please do not perceive me.

Comments and Engagement

I’m going to tell you to ignore the total likes and average likes partially, because there was a change I made with JetPack going a little poof: I went searching for an alternative to the likes function. I actually went searching for a plugin a long time ago, but I gave up on it because everything I came across just didn’t function the way I wanted to. Then I came across Daisybutter and noticed Michelle had this option, and I just had to resume my search until I found the plugin. I was a girl on a mission, and I’ve finally, finally found the plugin of my dreams: WP ULike.

(I probably could’ve sent an email to her going, “hey what plugin do you use for this function?” but I needed a distraction from the grief of getting let go again. At least, that’s what I tell myself… I’m actually just a shy, introverted girlie who makes her friendships from more extroverted introverts or extroverts adopting me.)

I love this plugin though; I made it similar to JetPack’s like button so as not to throw people off completely. Also, I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep the plugin, but I think I like it more than JetPack in some ways because now those who don’t have a WordPress account can also press that button if they so choose.

What I don’t love, however, is how I have to do some extra math from now on because there’s not an option to see what the performance is year by year: just for the week, the month, the year, and overall.

The one thing I can see being an issue with using both the JetPack’s like function and WP ULike is one person could like the post in both the Reader and the site, and that would skew the stats. If the same 62 people from the above screenshot liked the same post 62 times again (leaving 3 completely new ones), then we’re really just doubling the number. And this is absolutely possible, but I like how this gives others a chance to like the post when they otherwise couldn’t without a WordPress account. It makes engagement more accessible, and for that, I’ll take the risk.

Now, if we’re assuming each of those likes are unique, then we have a total of 127 likes for the year. We do a little math, and we have an average of 5.1 likes per post. I’d like to think having the plugin now does more good than harm in this instance.

Traffic Sources

Google Search Console Insights removed the top traffic channels at some point in 2024, so we’re stuck with the information from JetPack this year so no percentages. (ಥ﹏ಥ)

The majority of my traffic comes from search engines, with the WordPress reader being second and social media being third. Twitter fell much further down since I haven’t really been using it much throughout the year; frankly as soon as I got my new phone I never installed it and I truly can’t be arsed to do so. I’m also not active on Instagram and scarcely post in Facebook blogger groups, so it only makes sense that social media being a referral for me is dwindling down. I’ve not made a Bluesky account yet, mostly because I’m just Tired™ and don’t have the energy to handle yet another social media account when another billionaire could easily take it over and leave it in shambles.

It’s a blow to traffic a little, but it doesn’t hit me too hard, and I guess I’m okay with just vibing along in my corner.

There’s some traffic from my email subscribers, which I use follow.it for. One could say it falls in the same lines as the WordPress Reader because you don’t actually need to subscribe to me on follow.it to read my posts.

One thing I’ve noticed as an addition is ChatGPT, which is something that we probably all expected at some point as AI becomes more prominent in our lives. If I had to take a guess, I think I’ll be having more traffic referrals from ChatGPT when we look over 2025’s stats next year.

Audience

Last year was the first year I included the information from 2020 to 2022, and I thought it was interesting to look at how the blog audience changes over the years. Let’s see if anything’s changed this year!

To no surprise, the US is still the overwhelming majority in 2024 as it has been since I started tracking stats.

Over the years, I’ve noticed my blog audience has pivoted slowly to countries in South and Southeast Asia — 2022 and 2023 had at least 2 countries in the top 5 outside of Canada/Australia/the UK. Usually they’ll be on the lower end of the top 5 or one will be second or third and the other will be last. 2024 is the first year I notice where 2 non predominantly English-speaking countries are actually in the top 3.

I think it’ll be interesting to see if this continues in the next few years (assuming I’m still blogging), especially in the current political climate we’re in right now the US where things are quite uncertain.

Final Thoughts

This is such a long post, but we’ve made it! Hopefully, you found this post helpful and reassuring. If you’re thinking about doing a post on your blog statistics, I hope this will encourage you to share yours as well. And as always, please don’t let my numbers make you feel bad about yours; you’re doing amazing and everyone’s view of blogging success is different.

Thanks for sticking around this nearly 3K word piece of numbers and rambles; here’s to another year!