Most Read Posts of 2012

Here are WCI's most read posts of 2012. For the first time this year, I've added the number of page views, normalized so that the most read post has a page view score of 100.

1. Why are almost all economists unaware of Milton Friedman's thermostat? (100)

2. "The supply of money is demand determined" (43)

3. The Macroeconomics of Middle Earth (37) 

4. Teaching Purchasing Power Parity (30)

5. The Dirty Secret of Economics Education (27)

6. Anke Kessler on the effects of robocalls on voter turnout (19)

7. The burden of the (bad monetary policy) on future generations (19)

8. Can you please read a first year textbook? (18)

9. Teaching SRAS shocks (16) 

10. Debt is too a burden on our children (unless you believe in Ricardian equivalence) (16)

Traffic on the blog is 6 percent higher than in 2011. I suspect the lack of rapid growth indicates both a maturation of the blogosphere overall, and the diversion of Mike Moffatt and Stephen Gordon's blogging energies elsewhere.

Google analytics makes it possible to see where WCI's traffic is coming from. Most visitors either come to the site directly, or are referred here by google. Here are the top 10 sources of WCI traffic, along with the percentage of all page views that each source represents:

2012 Traffic sources:               Percent of page views:

1. Direct / no referral                 31
2. Google / organic                    25
3. Economists View                      7
4. Twitter                                   4
5. Google.com / referral              3
6. Themoneyillusion.com             3
7. Reddit.com                             2
8. Facebook.com                         2
9. Krugman.blogs.nytimes.com     2
10. news.ycombinator.com            1

Thank you, Mark Thoma, for all of the traffic you send our way!

What I found interesting was how the traffic sources shifted between 2011 and 2012. We are getting more of our traffic directly from google. Perhaps this is just random variation, but I suspect it may reflect the fact that WCI is now an established piece of hyperspace real estate. It's not uncommon for our posts to rank highly in google searches on any economics topic.

Facebook is less important now in terms of traffic sources than it was in 2011. I'm not sure whether that's a function of the way our facebook link is designed (it's a "like" not a "share") or if it reflect a secular decline in Facebook use. Twitter is on the rise, but still accounts for a relatively small share of traffic flows. 

2011 Traffic sources:                Percent of page views:

1. (direct) / (none)                           39
2. google / organic                            19
3. economistsview.typepad.com          6
4. facebook.com                                 4
5. google.com / referral                      3
6. themoneyillusion.com                     2
7. theglobeandmail.com                     2
8. economist.com                               2
9. t.co (twitter)                                  1
10. twitter.com                                     1

Other interesting factoids: 43 percent of a visitors are from Canada, and 31 percent from the US. The UK accounts for 6 percent of visitors, and Australia and Germany about 2 percent. German visitors, however, spend the most time on each page on average, while American readers spend the least. 

Comments

[Frances Woolley]

Nick, I know you've been finding it depressing to grade exams. Your near total dominance of this year's top 10 list should cheer you up.

[Miraj Patel]

Don't forget us feed readers, who don't get counted in any of these figures- so your reach is even higher than the numbers here suggest. Keep up the good work and Happy New Year to all of you!

[Frances Woolley]

Miraj - thank you for feed reading! Stephen Gordon has the number of feed readers, but I don't.

[Becky Hargrove]

I'm surprised that Economics Roundtable doesn't play a larger role in your traffic sources, as it directed me to your site several years ago. And of course Nick often showed up at other sites I visited, even then!

[rjs]

likewise, i see your posts first on the Economics Roundtable, & only occasionally recheck them when i see Thoma's links in the AM..

[Stephen Gordon]

All I know about the number of feed readers is what everyone who uses Google Reader knows: there are 2075 Google Reader subscribers to WCI. Can anyone who uses another reader provide us with a number from their preferred service?

[Nick Rowe]

Economics Roundtable and Mark Thoma's daily links are my two most useful sources for stuff I read.

I was surprised to see my MF's Thermostat so high. It was the subject of a long heated discussion on a techy blog/discussion group a few weeks back. Maybe that was it.

[Stephen Gordon]

Yes, there was a huge one-day spike on December 13 for that post - the kind we see when Paul Krugman links to us.

[Alex Godofsky]

Nick:

I was surprised to see my MF's Thermostat so high. It was the subject of a long heated discussion on a techy blog/discussion group a few weeks back. Maybe that was it.

Do you have a link to the post (on that other site)? I couldn't find anything like that on Google.

[oblivious]

I subscribe to the RSS feed using RSS reader software, not a web service. I'll look at a blog post directly if I'm interested in the comments for that post.

I'm curious whether you get more reddit traffic from Canadian subreddits or economics subreddits. I'm also curious whether you get more traffic from subreddits where WCI is more highly regarded (like r/NonAustrianEconomics or r/canadapolitics) or subreddits with bigger subscriber numbers (like r/economics or r/canada).

[Dyami Hayes]

I use Google Reader to access all my Econ and Philosophy Blogs. That probably is under the heading "Google/ Organic (?)

[Frances Woolley]

Oblivious - interesting question. Almost half of the traffic for my latest post on the macroeconomics of middle earth came from reddit, and it was also important for "modern medicine, warts and all." I couldn't figure out how to drill down to the subreddit level. Facebook was relatively important for the Robocalls post.

[Frances Woolley]

Oblivious - worked it out. Bigger subscriber numbers=more traffic, so we get more from r/economics than r/Non-AustrianEconomics

[Nick Rowe]

Alex: here is part of it but I can't figure out how to navigate that site to get to the whole thread.

[Alex Godofsky]

Nick: thanks. I think that is the whole thread. (ycombinator is basically reddit.) It's a little depressing how many people there still didn't fully get the idea even after the car analogy.

[Doly Garcia]

I came across you because you're getting cited by FT Alphaville, which I read regularly. I think you have a lot of interesting stuff to say.

I think your most read post hits on the nail one of the most glaringly obvious issues with economics (to me, as a mathematician and modeller). The economy is quite clearly a dynamic system with feedback loops. And the average economist doesn't even know the first thing about how dynamic systems behave in general. Milton Friedman's thermostat is one of the simplest observations that one can make about a dynamic system. To make it even worse, if you know a little about dynamic systems you'll be aware that for things that are in a feedback loop, if you can detect a correlation is usually the reverse one, simply because feedback that overshoots a little is usually more effective and useful than feedback that fails to hit the mark. Another worrying fact about two variables that are connected by a feedback loop but appear uncorrelated because of the feedback loop, is that feedback loops always have limits of operation. Outside those limits, when the feedback breaks down, you are likely to see fast changes and strong correlations. In other words, things that have appeared to be constant for a long time but nobody has a clear explanation for why they are constant or why they have this value are very likely to be driven by a feedback loop that might break down. My favourite one to worry about is the long-term trend for economic growth.

[Bill Lee]

I use the RSS feed of the Mozilla Thunderbird Mailer.
This should go directly to
http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/rss.xml
but it might go through the maintenance files of Gurgles.

If interesting I can expand there. (I don't use Thunderbird mailer for actual mail, using mutt and zimbra for that; I use it only for RSS Feeds)
Expanding in the mailer would account for an actual hit.

RSS for several Econ journals means a local database of articles that can be searched off line in the excellent Thunderbird indexing system. I have set for 'Never Delete' and get several gigabytes of data.

Some like Bild, the German Boulevardzeitung, I do have set for keep only recent 100.

[Min]

Happy New Year! :)

I would like to convey my gratitude to everyone here, authors and commenters alike, for making this a very interesting and educational site. Job very well done! :)

Posted from Bedlam to the South. ;) May global warming let me move to North Battleford.

[oblivious]

Frances - Thank you for assuaging my curiosity.

One interesting thing about that Hacker News thread (and it is indeed the entire thread) is how many people expressed that the article seemed to meander for several paragraphs. I interpret that people familiar with Nick Rowe were happy with an intro that gave an intuitive context for the problem, while people who had never heard of "Nick Rowe" wanted a hook to signal that the post's thesis was worthwhile.