And it’s time for another end of the year review post! I started the year off with a bang and a New Year’s Resolution: Tenants union activism. My first post of the year was Why You Should Join a Tenants Union in 2019. I was working on a tenants union with our local Iowa City DSA chapter, and we successfully formed in July. Not a bad start to 2019.
How’d the rest of the blogging year go?
Most Viewed Posts
Let’s check the vault and find out what people are reading. Here are the most viewed posts released in 2019:
1. 5 Successful Anti-Capitalist Films
2. Leaving Academia: A Guide
3. The Demographics of a Bernie Sanders Victory
In addition to these, there are a couple of posts I wrote in 2018 that get a lot of continuing traffic. Enough, in fact, to put them up there with the three above. Those 2018 posts are ones on Andrew Yang and UBI. Whereas my most successful posts from last year were about Midwest themes, the ones this year were about broader engagement. Reaching out beyond the blog’s core work of leftist theory and into the realms of culture, the world of career, and more targeted political analysis.
Popular Search Terms
Here’s some data from Google Search Console on the most common keywords people use when they find the blog and the page they land on.
1. Leftist Quiz (Political Quiz: Leftist, Liberal, or Bernie?)
2. Stephen Skowronek (Trump, the Political Order, and Stephen Skowronek)
3. Leaving Academia (the aforementioned Leaving Academia: A Guide)
One thing I’m happy to announce is that there are now several terms for which this blog is the #1 Google search result. And about 40 for which it’s in the top 5! Terms where this blog is #1: Foucault png, identitarianism vs. identity politics, and universal basic income right wing.
The Financials of Blogging
As I said in my review last year, my eventual goal with this blog is to make enough money to cover my costs of running it. Those costs run about $100 per year. Last year I was making money at a rate of about $4/year. Obviously that’s well short of $100.
I’m doing better this year. In terms of total money raised in 2019, I’m at $18.10 from affiliate marketing and $20.93 from ad revenue. So, I’m about 40% of the way to running a profitable blog. And, as I’ve said before, I don’t currently accept donations. Please don’t feel any obligations to financially contribute to this blog. If you’d like to support the blog financially, click an ad or a product link!
Miscellanea
And then there’s a few other things I wrote about in last year’s Year in Review: geographical origins of readership, devices used to access the site, etc. I’d write about that stuff again, but it hasn’t changed much. A bit under three-quarters of readers are from the United States, and there’s a roughly equal split between desktop/laptop and cell phone users.
One note on site traffic, though. Traffic spiked quite a bit in the early months of 2019, through about May or June. And then declined over the summer, with the exception of the dates of the Democratic presidential debates. That’s a pretty normal pattern for websites, but it’s always a bummer to see your traffic decline. And while it’s picked up since the summer, it hasn’t yet recovered to pre-summer levels.
Not to bore anyone with the details of this, but I’ve recently diagnosed the problem. It turns out that when I converted the blog to a secure site (https vs. http), some of my pages still operated independently as http. Long story short, this means I’ve probably been underestimating the site’s traffic levels. Now that I’ve fixed the issue, I expect to see more accurate (and higher) traffic numbers.
2020 Preview
What’s coming up next on Base and Superstructure? You won’t have to wait long! I’ve got a few things in the works. Here are a couple themes you’ll find in January and February: race and the various tools of capital, language and sexuality, and the Iowa caucuses!
