JUST BACKDATED - End Of Year Statistics

If the pattern of traffic continues in the manner it has tended to do all year, by the time Old Father Time rings the bell on 2014 Just Backdated will have clocked up over 180,000 hits in its lifetime, for as I write this, sipping my morning cup of tea on the last day of the year, the figure stands at 177,947. That’s an average of about 487.5 hits a day for a total of 374 posts. But as I have already noted, this is misleading because if we disregard my Who posts, many of which have been boosted by links from the group’s official Facebook page and website, the figure would be less than half that. Nevertheless it’s far more than I had hoped when I launched Just Backdated at the end of last year with about 50 posts all in one day, the better to get some meat on the bone for the lift off.

Nevertheless, a glance at the top ten posts shows it has remained pretty much static since I last did a survey like this, when it reached 100,000 on October 26, and noted that nine in the top ten were Who-related. All that’s changed in this regard is that my review of The Who Hits 50 show in Birmingham (2,490) has edged out Part 3 of my Keith Moon interview (2,294) at number 10, the only non-Who post making the list still the one about Rory Gallagher and his battered old Strat (2,576). Still top of the list and, as I noted before, unlikely ever to be toppled is the one about Moonie getting between John & Paul Beatle for their last ever photograph together (taken by my pal Dougal Butler) with 13,866 hits, well over twice as many than number two, my post about Pete and Roger announcing the 2014 Who tour with their mini gig at Ronnie Scott’s Club on June 30 (5,181). The truth is that if I was to have created Just Backdated purely as a Who blog, then the average number of hits per post would have been far higher, but then again there wouldn't have been anywhere near as many total posts of course. 

As it is almost all the posts about The Who have topped the 1,000 mark with the majority hovering between 1,500 and 2,000 but The Who aside, only four other posts have reached 1,000: the extract from Martin Power’s Jeff Beck biography (1,634), my interview with Lowell George (1,386), the extract from Tony Fletcher’s Man About Town memoir (1,129) and my story about Wilko Johnson at the Louder Than Words Festival in Manchester (1,103), though it could be argued that three of these are Who related insofar as the Beck post was about ‘Bolero’ which featured Keith prominently, Tony was writing about Keith’s death and Wilko is now connected with Roger through their deservedly acclaimed Going Back Home album, my review of which grabbed 1,849 hits incidentally.

So what of the rest? Well, strangely enough my posts about Abba’s live album and Jimmy Page’s PA to promote his book have both received exactly the same number of hits (852) but only one other post topped the 500 mark, my iPod run down on June 2, which beat them both by registering 885. I have no explanation for why this is so, as the other four iPod shuffle posts I wrote registered less than 300 between them, with the lowest on just 32.

One interesting statistic is that if we discount the Moon with John & Paul photograph, Badfinger, on average, get more hits than The Beatles, which supports the controversial theory that the Welsh group led by Pete Ham and Tom Evans are what The Beatles could have become if only they’d tried harder. On the whole The Beatles fare poorly, even my interviews with John, while posts on Abba, Slade, Led Zeppelin and The Kinks do far better. I suspect this is because the internet is clogged with sites about The Beatles.

As before the most hits have come from the US (98,981), followed by the UK (41,748) with a big drop down to Canada (6,362), Japan (4,786) and Germany (4,584). Blogspot only shows the top ten countries in this regard but it’s nice to see Ukraine holding 10^th spot with 970 hits, and my best wishes to those in that battle-scarred land who’ve logged on.

So thanks to all who’ve visited Just Backdated in the past 12 months and here’s wishing you all the very best for 2015.

CC, 30.12.14