Myriad most popular: 2012

These annual posts have been illuminating. This year, they tell me my audience is primarily two groups of people:

1. People who stopped by for Olympic medal projections. That alone accounted for 40.22% of my traffic. Then figure that the home page, which at the time was set so that you could often read whole posts without clicking through, got 38.27%.

2. The women’s soccer community. That’s 10.87% of my traffic. General soccer (men’s and women’s) took another 1.02%. Men’s soccer drew only 1.04% — partially the effect of covering less of it, but even the somewhat interesting posts drew squat. The MLS team pages drew 0.49%.

Beyond that, someone out there is still reading the Duke lacrosse commentary (proof that the best way to get traffic is to toss some reality into a deluded echo chamber), and people really don’t care about The Ultimate Fighter recaps any more. Bad news for me, considering I just finished a book on that topic.

Not that my next book ideas are looking better. My Single-Digit Soccer posts have been ignored. Don’t care — I’m writing that book, anyway. Doping posts also didn’t do that well, though I don’t plan to do a book on that.

Here’s the funny thing about Olympic sports: Everyone read the medal projections, but no one stuck around for the Olympic daily glances that I loved writing.

What does all of this mean for next year? Stay tuned …