The Analytics of This Site

Declan Chidlow

The Analytics of This Site

920 words
25 Apr 2025

I collect some anonymous analytics on my Vale.Rocks. Not because I feel the need to spy on my users every move, but rather because I quite enjoy nerding out about statistics. I love being able to see what country people are showing up from, what devices they’re using, and their browsers. Being able to see view counts tick up also helps my motivation.

I also find it endlessly interesting to go have a look at where people are finding my site. Sometimes I’ll find that one of my posts has ended up in some obscure non-English newsletter, or at other times on some niche forum straight out of the last century. It’s lovely being able to go down little rabbit holes inspecting such cases and to jump into discussions across the net.

I collect referrers, browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, locations, and languages.

GoatCounter is blocked by every ad/content blocker I’ve tested. It wouldn’t be difficult to skirt around this, but I don’t want to. If people have made the (presumably informed) decision to block advertisements and tracking scripts, I wish to respect that decision. Yes, it will skew the data, but that is a price I’m willing to pay. I value my visitors decisions and autonomy.

Notes

My readership is not representative of a general audience. As a byproduct of my chosen topics and most popular writings, my readership is largely technical. This is manifested in the data in multiple ways.

As of March 2025, statcounter’s Browser Market Share Worldwide data places Chrome at 66.16%, Edge at 5.17%, Safari at 17.62%, and Firefox at 2.52% market share. Vale.Rocks is at contrast to this with Chrome at 49% (I believe Chromium-based Edge is included in this figure), Safari at 41%, and Firefox at 10%. Given that Firefox still supports Manifest v2, it is the natural choice for adblockers. As such, it may actually be under-represented in this data.

Going off the figure that 31.5% of people globally use adblockers (a figure which might be conservative), my statistics are possibly 30% or more larger. Though it might be even higher due to my technical audience, which is more likely to use adblockers and block tracking.

Plausible claims that, overall, 58% of people in tech-savy audiences block Google Analytics. They consider tech-savvy audiences to mainly be Hacker News readers and Reddit users – my two biggest referrers. They claim that 88% of Firefox users block GA, and 82% of Linux users do as well, which are both already over-represented in my data.

GoatCounter reports iOS as the most used operating system, but it is also the most difficult of all the major operating systems to install content blockers onto. MacOS and Linux are represented more than they are generally, but I would expect that from a technical audience. It also seems twisted people occasionally tune in from Windows Phones.

This all likely leads to under-representing what is already over-represented in my analytics – at least as compared to a more general, less niche, audience. If you’d like to attempt to extrapolate the actual values based on the above notes, you’re welcome to, but I’ll be presenting the data values as it comes from GoatCounter.

By a sizable margin (~84%), most site visitors speak English, as you’d expect from a website written in English. This tends to be followed by German at around the 3–4% mark and then French, Spanish, and Italian. Beyond that, numbers get too small to be of much note.

As you’d expect based on languages, Western countries are the biggest readers. The US is in the lead at ~40%. I’d assume this is in no small part due to Hacker News. Germany follows at ~7% alongside the UK. This is followed by Canada, Australia, and India. I’d suggest India is up there by virtue of the country’s large population rather than any specific Indian readership. I’d also like to extend a greeting to my small readership of tax evaders in the Cayman Islands.

In the below lists of top referrers, Hacker News does not include all alternate front-ends. There are a lot of Hacker News front-ends. A lot.

2025

Quarter 1

For the quarter running from 01/01/2025 until 03/31/2025.

Total visits during this period: 50,094

2024

Pre-2025 stats are fairly rough due to a failed merging of page statistics done in an attempt to address a change in URL structure – particularly the data early in the year. JPEG XL and Google’s War Against It was the first time I saw any notable traffic, and it almost exclusively came from Hacker News. From memory, there was a spike of ~1.7K readers over a 24-hour period. Based on subsequent Hacker News hits of mine, this seems low, but it wasn’t widely shared outside of Hacker News and was somewhat controversial, which would have stifled its publicity.

In late 2024, I wrote for HTMHell, sending a small spike of users to my site. Around the same time, Web Origami also did the rounds on Hacker News, sending a fair few users this way both through a link I posted to this site’s homepage, a link to my post on The Implementation of This Site in the comments and the project’s website from people checking out the examples page.