This is to complement Frances' post on which WCI posts were most liked on Facebook. Here are the ten posts that received the most page views since January 1:
- The mathematics generation gap
- This is what a balance-sheet recession looks like, and it's not pretty
- Dumb men commercials
- US productivity exceptionalism
- What's the best way to scale grades?
- The behavioural economist's dilemma: induction versus deduction
- A brief history of the federal budget surplus
- Do Keynesians believe their own models?
- I=S
- Why New Keynesian economists are against labour unions
Frances and Nick - you might want to forward this to your dean.
Stephen, it's very interesting to contrast this with the 2010 list.
Last year's list was dominated by Rowe and Gordon. True, Mike and I didn't join until Spring 2010, but that doesn't entirely explain the difference. I suspect that the less wonky flavour of this year's most viewed list reflects the fact that we've now added a facebook like button, and we're now generating more traffic that way.
Other considerations: Mike and Stephen are generating traffic through twitter, and Nick didn't do many posts in the first quarter of 2011.
When I type "scaling grades" into google, that WCI post comes up as the #3 hit. So I suspect that #5 ranking is coming from google searches.
Posted by: Frances Woolley | December 28, 2011 at 07:26 PM
"When I type "scaling grades" into google, that WCI post comes up as the #3 hit. So I suspect that #5 ranking is coming from google searches."
If you have Google Analytics, you should be able to verify your hypothesis.
Posted by: David | December 28, 2011 at 08:00 PM
David, Stephen has all of this data, I've signed up for google analytics, but haven't worked out how to get it to work for me. It's easier to just ask Stephen.
Posted by: Frances Woolley | December 28, 2011 at 08:08 PM
How does one find WCI on Facebook? I searched for the full name and didn't get anything. Gave up searching through the many results I got for "WCI" "Stephen Gordon" and "Nick Rowe" -- and the most relevant-looking "Frances Woolley" didn't have anything related listed as an interest.
Posted by: Andy Harless | December 29, 2011 at 01:40 PM
Andy - WCI only gets on Facebook when our readers put us there - that is, when someone presses the facebook 'like' button after reading the post. We haven't even figured out how to put a pretty pictures beside the facebook likes, so it usually comes up with the typepad default which is really ugly. Even so, we're now getting about 20% of our traffic via facebook (or we were, last time Stephen gave me the numbers).
Stephen, you have to show me how to work google analytics.
Posted by: Frances Woolley | December 29, 2011 at 03:13 PM
This is an exceptionally good blog - please keep up the excellent work, all of you!
I have learned more basic macro concepts from this blog than from my courses in graduate school (although that's more of a reflection of how slow I am and how clearly Nick explains stuff rather than a reflection of the quality of my teachers in grad school).
If only there were another blog that did as great a job at teaching methods then I'd be all set and grad school would be redundant (except for signaling purposes).
Posted by: primedprimate | December 30, 2011 at 01:10 AM
The fact I was also AWOL the last few months didn't help. A great list overall!
RE: Pageviews. I wonder if I'm competing against my About.com work (which gets a *ton* of pvs), which has reduced my ability to rank highly in Google here. Need to find topics I didn't write about there.
Posted by: Mike Moffatt | December 30, 2011 at 10:11 AM