I rarely look at the stats on my blog because I really only blog for myself. However the other day I happened to just click on to see if anyone but me sees my posts, and I was rather surprised. My main views after the US are Russia and China?? Really considering most of my posts are Project Life or our travel. Years ago I recall that in addition to the US, most of the people looking at my blog were from Australia and the random European. Now that predominance of Russia and China give me pause considering all the news of the past year and the creation of 'believable' bots. Any thoughts?
That would make me curious, for sure. Digiscrapping is quite big in Russia so that could make sense. However, I get no hits on my blog from either Russia or China .... Do you pin from your blog or think someone may have pinned a layout from it to Pinterest? It could be from a popular pin.
Thanks @LynnG . Yes, I forget that digiscrap is big in Russia and the graphic designers are pretty wonderful from the designs I see for sale on line. No I don't Pin almost at all. I used to do almost all social media but have pulled back more and more.
United States, Russia and Ukraine are my top 3. Considering China has a pretty tight reign on their internet (or at least try to) that is interesting.
My stats looks similar to yours except I have South Africa as light green where you have Australia. Which kinda makes sense. However now that I see I have men following my blog - that seems weird, seeing as though I basically blog my scrapping. United States32 Russia24 South Africa15 France5 China4 New Zealand2 Portugal2 Romania2 Serbia2 Canada1 these were my recent page views.
I don't blog regularly at the moment but I have had Russian bots attack my newsletter sign up on my website (and causing issues with my Mailchimp acount since I didn't catch it right away) recently. I tightened that down and have been good since but I make sure I keep better watch on it all now. I guess there are a lot of Russian bots like that out there.
A robot.. the kind that are looking for info. you know how you log in to stuff and have to code what you see in the box, so they make sure you aren't a robot? that is what a bot is Nancy
Half my Flickr followers are male photographers. It threw me off too when I realized that. I don't know what country of course. I don't blog frequent enough to have a big following. When I did, most of my views were overseas. I figure there are a lot of people in the world, and with Google Translate, the world is a little smaller. I followed blogs from France, Norway, and Australia for awhile among others. I wonder if I freaked out those people!
Stefanie @Eyeore did your blog break down the stats on gender or did you just do the math on how many men are following your blog by counting your followers list?
Why would it bother you? I seriously don't understand. I'm actually finding this pretty insulting to people from those countries tbh.
@berniek I never intended this to be insulting to anyone from any country but...sadly we have had so many international hacks and the interference of bots in our country (our elections?) that it has become an issue. Because this is the scrapping forum that seems to have the most members who scrap and blog as I do, it seemed the venue to ask the question. When you think of how much info we put in our blogs and ON our scrapbook pages, it's given me a not so good feeling to have such a high interest from those two locations. Those two countries are not our political allies. At the same time, I don't think my country is 'white as snow' innocent and my experience has been that governments are not the same as the people who live there. You may not have those concerns in the Netherlands but I do here in the United States.
@cookingmylife I'm glad you did not intend it that way. I do think we should be very aware of what kind of effect these kinds of claims or phrasing might have though. I also wonder which county IS a political ally of your country at the moment? But I don't want to turn this into a political debate. So let's ignore this.
While I truly understand both points of view here and think that each of you have valid perspectives, I am going to ask that we tiptoe away from the political implications here. It's important to remember that we have diverse membership in this community and the lens by which we may filter this discussion could be very different based on our nationality. Thanks for understanding and respecting the desire to be neutral in this forum, where I always like to think our love for scrapbooking is a great unifier and where issues, like this one, may best be left at the forum doors.