Pornokitsch: Quarterly Update
Sunday, March 23, 2014
We've been doing some odd new stuff this year, so I've been poking around at the numbers. Now, approaching the end of March, there have been just over 80 blog posts on Pornokitsch in 2014.
The most popular:
1. Sarah Lotz on bad reviews (by a country mile)
3. Kameron Hurley's mom (this is awesome - see #6, below)
4. "Saga's Children" by E.J. Swift
5. "Literary authors slumming in genre" (Poking at Awards series)
6. Kameron Hurley (see #3, above)
7. Fun facts about The King in Yellow (shameless True Detective click-bait)
8. Nick Wood on South African SF/F
9. Kate Keen on alternate universes in fanfiction
10. "Self-publishing a best-seller"
That's fun, but what's it mean going forwards?
Skimming through the rest of the posts, the Friday Fives, as a whole, have all been very popular. This is particularly gratifying. We're almost through our first stack, and will be re-opening for new guests soon.
I'm glad to see that the work-intensive posts (the awards series, the self-publishing one) are popular. It is nice to feel like we're adding new stuff to the conversation, and I'm glad people are responding to it.
Our reviews are all over the place, as usual, but we thrive on the bonkers long tail stuff (see below). The only problem there is that we haven't written many of them. Anne's done well with her film reviews, but I'm way behind on the books (despite doing ok on my reading). A guilt-inspired reviewing spree may happen at some point soon.
On the other hand, the weekly free fiction has proven a less successful experiment, and I'd be keen to hear people's feedback. We pay for it, so I think it needs to work hard to justify spending money on it - either in generating (unprofitable, but still useful) traffic or (Jurassic) book sales. Would people rather read more new stuff? More old stuff? Less obscure stuff? Or should we just drop the experiment entirely? Let me know what you'd like to see.
One more fun fact - speaking of the long tail stuff, we still get the (vast) majority of our traffic through organic search. From conversation, I think this is different from many other blogs - especially because our search traffic isn't concentrated on a few big front-list reviews. Rather our visitors come fairly evenly across our 2,000 odd posts on obscure books and random films that no one else talks about. As noted above, bonkers long tail FTW. You who are about to search for John D. MacDonald's Mexican sex farce, we salute you.
Social's also big for us (about 1/4 of all traffic), and Twitter is killing the other social media when it comes to generating traffic. We had a year - 2012? - where Facebook was top, but after they rejigged their algorithm to pay-or-die, Twitter retook pole position.
Also, everyone is still reading the Rothfuss review. God bless you, internet.