My 10 Most trafficked posts of 2010

You can learn a lot by looking at what you’ve done over a year.

So, while I try to get better at making goals and sticking to them, I have an eye to my work here, because this has always been a place for experimentation and learning, where I develop my thoughts, my writing and my style.

So, like I did last year and the year before, I’ve looked at the 15 most trafficked posts I’ve written here.

Looking at the list I think there are two specific lessons to be learned:

  • Original Reporting rocks — It’s just what I saw in Technically Philly’s roundup of top stories. In this list of 10, seven featured first-issue original reporting, two offered insider commentary and one offered a strong opinion. No aggregation, summaries or general perspective made it to the list, though I do all those kinds of posts too and those kind of posts dominated my 2008 list and had more influence on my 2009 list.
  • Time matters — This site gets a relatively low-level of traffic (the top post on this list received fewer than 500 hits this year), so the sheer amount of time a post is up is magnified. With bigger traffic sites, the first week of traffic can largely overcome a long tail. However in my case, just one of the 10 posts was created in the last four months, and I don’t think that’s due to lack of relatively meaningful content. So, with lower traffic sites, the longer a post is up has a greater impact on its overall traffic than with higher traffic sites.

That said, here are the posts. Draw your own conclusions:

10. Newsworks: WHYY online news brand launching means a lot to these legacies — Nov. 22

Find the other nine below.

9. U.S. theatrical premiere, Madeleine Albright and what it means for local journalism — June 7

8. Inquirer: My first couch surfing experience — Apr. 16


7. Announced proposal for William Penn Foundation hyperlocal investment (Jan. 13) — On an initiative that just had its greater details released last month.

6. How to set up a freelancing sole proprietorship — Feb. 8

5. Welcome to Fishtown [Jan. 8] — In which I announced my home purchase.

4. Stories that never ran: What does a sex columnist look like? — Jan. 20


3. NewsWorks: WHYY will announce new hyperlocal news initiative for northwest Philadelphia (April 12) — In which I first wrote about the news initiative that was more recently detailed in the No. 10 post above.


2. Murder rates in Philadelphia and other cities are all marketing — July 2

1. Stories that never ran: ‘Can the Devon Theater survive in Mayfair? — Jan. 6

Any favorites? I was a little surprised by that top story.

Less trafficked, strong posts from 2010

And also, because it isn’t all about traffic, here are six posts that I think are among my best that didn’t get the most traffic:

http://christopherwink.com/2010/04/16/inquirer-my-first-couch-surfing-experience/

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