Looking Back at 2023 on the Blog

Yesterday, I posted my customary look ahead to the month to come on the blog. Here now is a look back at the past year.

I reported last year that 2022 saw the highest traffic to date on the blog, up by 10% from the previous year. Well, 2023 bested 2022 by some margin. Page views were up by 33% over 2022 and, more importantly, the number of unique visitors rose sharply as well: by 29%. This is as gratifying as it is mystifying. Mystifying because I see this as a very niche and minor corner of the internet; gratifying because, well, because even a miserable bastard like me does appreciate having an audience. Where exactly did that audience come from last year and what did they mostly read? Don’t be impatient: I’m about to tell you.

My readership remains predominantly based in the US, which accounted for 77% of all page-views. That share is actually down an appreciable amount from 2022, when US-based traffic accounted for 82% of all page-views. The biggest chunk of that traffic share was taken by readers from India, which continued in second place but by a much larger margin than before, accounting for 2.5x the traffic of the third-placed United Kingdom. I continue to take great pleasure in the fact that I have a growing readership in India. The rest of the top 10 was rounded out by Canada, Australia, Singapore, Germany, South Korea, Netherlands and Vietnam, in that order. But almost the entire world was represented in the larger traffic map.

Not sure what Paraguay had against me last year but they ruined my streak of 100% Americas coverage. In Asia, Turkmenistan continues to spurn me.

What were all these people reading? Well, at this point there’s no denying that this is predominantly a food blog. I might still be posting as many whisky reviews as I did when this was known primarily as a whisky blog, but if you look at what people are actually reading, there’s no doubt that it’s the food content that’s the draw. Only two of the top 30 most-read posts on the blog involved whisky, and neither of them were reviews: “The Real and Fictional History of Loch Lomond” at #10 and my evergreen look at Glendronach’s “single cask” shenanigans, which came in at #26. The first whisky review comes in at #46 (the Talisker 11 from Diageo’s 2022 Special Release). There was only another whisky review in the top 100 (the Kilkerran 16 at #86). There was only one other booze post in the top 100: my post on Col. E.H. Taylor, bourbon and tradition, which came in at #58. So, only five booze posts in the top 100 and only two of those were reviews (and only one of those two was posted this year). Those three non-reviews were also the top three most-read booze posts in 2022, by the way. Well, you can look forward to ignoring my booze reviews for the next few months as well…

So, which were the most popular food posts? Here is the top 30:

I noted last year that my review of my dinner at Bukhara in March 2022 missed the top 20 list by just a few views. Well, this year it rocketed to the very top of the list. I’m not really sure what’s driving that. The only other real surprise on the list is that my piece on controversies at Joe Beef in 2019 is still getting read. I’m glad to note that my piece on the American food media’s misunderstanding of the place of “curry” in Indian food culture is also still being read. My guide to the vast menu at Bloomington’s Grand Szechuan also continues to be popular, picking up more readers in 2023 than in 2022. Please keep sharing it with people looking for good Chinese food in the Twin Cities metro.

Even as I moved my cooking posts to my Instagram Reels, my recipes have clearly continued to be one of the major drivers of traffic on the blog. Unsurprisingly, the most popular recipes were for beans. This is not a surprise to me because I am aware of and very thankful for the interest in my recipes on the Rancho Gordo Bean Club Facebook group. I’m also happy to see that my recipe for pineapple chutney continues to be popular. More of a surprise is that my 2022 recipe for gurda-kapoora masala, which features goat testicles and kidneys, did so well in 2023: it had almost 4x the views that it did in 2022!

No surprise as well that of my Twin Cities metro write-ups, those focusing on restaurants and markets in the East Metro continue to outperform those centered on the West Metro, even though that’s where the Twin Cities restaurant money really is (in Minneapolis). This is not a surprise because of the continued support of Mike McGuinness and the excellent and very active East Metro Foodies group on Facebook. It’s not anything I take for granted. And nor do I take for granted the various other Twin Cities Facebook groups that are welcoming to my reviews, especially those in Bloomington.

Still in the overall top 10, by the way, was my brief piece from 2020 on Arun Kolatkar’s poem, “Irani Cafe, Bombay”, which dropped from #1 last year to #9 this year. The popularity of this post is one of the great non sequiturs in my blog stats, but it continues to tickle me. By the way, at the end of next week my students and I will be going on a poetry crawl that will explore the geography of Kolatkar’s poetry in Bombay (though, alas, that particular Irani cafe, The Wayside Inn, is no more).

Okay, none of this is probably of interest to anyone other than myself and so I’ll stop here. Whatever it is you’re coming here to read, I hope you find it interesting even if you don’t always agree with it. And would it kill you to comment from time to time?