Last week was the biggest week ever for the Oikos blog: 2526 page views! And since WordPress doesn’t count syndicated views in that total (well, they started doing so a few weeks ago, then mysteriously stopped after a few days), the true number of views is considerably higher. Those aren’t all unique visitors of course, but I’m ok with that because if some visitors are staying to read a bunch of posts, that means they must really like the blog.
We’ve been averaging well over 2000 (non-syndicated) views per week for the past three weeks, a level we previously only reached a couple of times. And we’ve been averaging 2000+ without posting more frequently than usual. So I’m cautiously optimistic that 2000+ is the “new normal” (we used to get 1400-2000 views/week, depending on the posting frequency). I’m told by more experienced blogging colleagues that 2000+/week is more than respectable traffic for a blog with a pretty narrow, specialized audience. And given that we just experienced a significant jump, I don’t see any reason to think we’ve plateaued yet.
So thanks for reading, everyone! It’s both awesome and humbling to have such a big audience, and it’s certainly a strong incentive to keep it up and even try to make the Oikos blog even better.
Now that we’ve established a (very large!) audience, I’m hoping that will provide some incentive for some of my fellow Oikos editors to start posting occasionally (the original plan was that this would be a group blog for the entire editorial board). I think one cool thing would be for each editor to do a short post laying out what’s the “next big thing” in his or her own subfield–what’s the “state of the art”, in terms of our questions and how we go about answering them? How’s it changing? How should it change? I think it would also be fun to have some debates among the editors–would just need to find some suitable topics on which we disagree! Any good blog debates could be a good starting point for Forum articles in the journal.
But those are just my ideas. What do you want to see from the Oikos blog? Besides more zombie jokes (those are a given). 😉
Dynamic Ecology 