A year with Flagcounter

About a year ago, I stumbled upon a nice looking visit counter on some site, which would show visits by country and keep a public record of how many visitors per country a site get. I quickly decided to add it to this notepad, because I felt that, unlike other counters, this one showed funny trivia instead of an unpersonal number. A year and a day later (yeah, was too busy yesterday so I missed the real anniversary), let’s make a summary of all the visits 🙂

In total, there were 276,894 unique visitors, from 208 countries. The top 10 countries by unique visitors is as follow:
1. United States – 31,156 visitors (among which 6,113 from California and 2053 from both Texas and New York, and on the other end, only 24 from both Wyoming and South Dakota)
2. Germany – 17,092
3. France – 9,808
4. United Kingdom – 8,460
5. Italy – 6,761
6. Poland – 6,741
7. India – 5,468
8. Canada – 5,226
9. Russia – 5,208
10. Brazil – 4,993

This site is in a large majority written in English, with some French posts here and there (some of which pretty high traffic), and has been hosted majoritarily in Germany (around Berlin I think, I moved it back to France some months ago).

It’s interesting to notice that not so many visitors come from English-speaking countries. Not sure if this means that search engines tend to suggest contents in English even to those searching in their native language, or that people search in English more often than I thought (whenever I discuss with real life friends here in friends, they almost always are die-hard local language searchers), or just because my portable Flash gets a lot of traffic, and for this one the language spoken by the searcher is maybe less relevant.

The very high amount of visitors from Germany, while not a single page on this site is in German, is probably due to Google giving a priority boost to sites hosted locally. It will be interesting to see how this changes now that the site is back in France.
The farily high amound of French visitors (despite the well-known aversion to any kind of foreign language proficiency here ^^) can probably be explained by a couple of posts where I posted solutions to some French websites’ contests, which drew a few thousands people to the site.

The fairly low position of China (22nd with 1,984), lower for instance than Portugal, Switzerland or Turkey, may be due to Chinese searching more often locally and in their language (hi Baidu ;)). In contrast, Hong Kong, with a much lower population, is 32nd with 1,377 unique visitors with 0.5% of China’s population (although of course there is also the proportion of population with an internet access to be taken into account).

Finally, a bit of exotism: the latest country added to the list of visiting countris was Turks and Caicos Islands, population: 47,754. This is actually a British overseas territory located North of Hawai.