The Weblog Review -2013

How was 2013 for The Mad Monarchist? Not the best honestly, but a better year for The Mad Monarchist blog. In the month of October the blog had a record 109,750 views, passing the previous record, also set in 2013, in January, of 97,104 views. The most popular article of 2013 was, surprisingly enough, the profile on Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria with 6,261 people checking that one out, evidently after the link was shared by a school group (so that might be cheating as these may have been young people required to learn about Emperor Ferdinand rather than so many being genuinely interested). By far the most people who came to The Mad Monarchist arrived via Google or Google Search, however, once again the top blog sending viewers this way was Royal World operated by American monarchist Theodore Harvey which last year passed the 2,000 mark in the number of visitors arriving from that destination (now close to 3,000 overall). Royal World gets a sticker.

As for audience, not surprisingly, most readers are from the English-speaking world; the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. For the non-English-speaking world, again, not much change, with most readers hailing from Germany, France, The Philippines, Brazil, Russia and India (The Philippines and India both having large numbers of English-speakers). What was surprising was the East Asia area in 2013. There are, now and then, sufficient visitors from Korea and Japan to show up on the stats but never before this year were there any from mainland China. So, it seems The Mad Monarchist has managed to penetrate the “Great Chinese Firewall” and before anyone cries foul, I no longer have any relatives in China and the time my cousin spent living there did not coincide with the boost in readers. Unfortunately, based on the comments received from “The Middle Kingdom” these were often not monarchist or monarchy-inclined readers but people rather upset that yours truly is anti-Chinese. That, of course, could not be farther from the truth. The Mad Monarchist is a big fan of China and a great admirer of Chinese culture, just not of the monstrous regime that is currently in charge of things.

Perhaps the biggest blog milestone of 2013 was passing the two million mark for visitors to the blog since it started (at its current location). I can just recall when 200,000 seemed like a big deal. Overall this year the blog has remained pretty consistent at having about 3,000 readers each day. Still, the numbers have tended in the upward direction and though I do not do this for that reason (otherwise I would still not be selling ad-space) it is always nice to see more people being interested. Just at the very end of the year, yours truly also found out that someone had been posing as The Mad Monarchist on Twitter and evidently got up to no good as the account was banned. To try to stop a repeat of this, your blogger of questionable sanity recently joined the Twitter-verse at MadMonarchist1, feel free to follow there though there is not much at the present. When it comes to overall advice (not the ‘do this’ or ‘do that’ sort) I was surprised by the recurring comment that I am too “mysterious”. This surprises me since I have never been bashful about giving my opinion on anything and because I have posted several interviews in the past and they never broke any popularity records. However, I am completely open to doing blog posts or videos or something answering any questions readers may have if that is something people would be interested in seeing. I am certainly not secretive or mysterious by nature -I prefer, “delightfully difficult” or “charmingly eccentric”.

In any event, whether you prefer more or less of one thing or another, I want to thank all of you readers out there who have kept up by becoming members, subscribing, following on Facebook or just checking in every day to see the latest insanity. I do appreciate it, I hope I have not caused too much disappointment in 2013 and I hope you will stick around for 2014.

A prosperous new year to all and … stay “mad” my friends.

The Mad Monarchist