Happy new year!
This has been the fifth year of our blogging (we started in July 2011). Most of the writing has passed to Mendee and I, though Byamba and Brandon have continued to chip in. We’ve managed to post at least once for every month of the existence of the blog.
We wrote 39 posts this year, roughly three per month.
Over the year we’ve had 14,000+ readers looking at over 36,000 pages. On average, readers stay 1′:45″ to read 1.7 pages which has been fairly consistent over the years (2′ and 1.8 over existence of the blog. Over the existence of the blog, we’ve had 68,000 users.
The most-read post (at 560+ times) was the March 2 post about the arbitration award to Khan Resources, followed by the Jan 30 post about PM Saikhabileg’s SMS poll, and the June 2 post about policy failures (both still with 500+ readers).
Cumulatively the most-read post has been an attempt to understand Mongolia’s Transparency International ranking in 2012 with nearly 1,500 reads.
No 2015 post was read less than 40 times.
The most popular page has consistently been our listing of non-Mongolian mining companies (viewed nearly 5,000 times), though this remains in some need of updating given the departure of numerous companies over the past several years.
The greatest number of sessions originated in Mongolia (21%), followed by the U.S. (20%), and Canada (13%). The most surprising among the top 10 source countries (to me at least) is Denmark with 2% of users. Somewhat surprisingly, China doesn’t crack the top 10 users coming in at 15th. The visit of Prime Minister Modi may have catapulted India into the top 10 (8th with over 2% of users), but two India-focused posts mat have also contributed to that interest. Only single sessions originated from Rwanda, Uruguay and Samoa (among others).
Roughly half of all sessions started via an organic search, 9% via Twitter. Twitter referrals account for nearly 70% of all social network-sourced users. According to Twitter Analytics my monthly “top tweet” that directly linked to a blog post in 2015 was an October 2015 tweet about Pres. Elbegdorj’s proposal of seeking permanent neutrality for Mongolia. This post received over 2,500 impressions, was re-tweeted 11 times, and the link to the blog post was clicked on 15 times.
Mobile users are creeping up on nearly 20% of readers.
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Just a short note to explain the (not so) surprising thing about Denmark being in the top ten list:
*Danish explorers, among them Henning Haslund Christensen, established a farm in Erdenebulgan in Hövsgöl aimag in the early 1920s. The leader of this expedition, Carl Krebs, stayed at the farm with his family until 1936.
*Haslund-Christensen – travel writer and self-taught anthropologist – stayed in Inner Mongolia and later joined Swedish Sven Hedin on expeditions in Inner Mongolia in the late 1920s. Haslund-Christensen then led the first and the second Danish Central Asian Expeditions in Inner Mongolia. The Ethnographic Collection at the Danish National Museum contains around 3000 Mongolian objects collected by Haslund-Christensen (http://natmus.dk/historisk-viden/verden/asien/mongoler/ ).
*Henning Haslund-Christensen son, Søren Haslund-Christensen, later became Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household in Denmark and the Danish crown prince has visited Mongolia three times.
*The Danish-Mongolian friendship society was established in 1990 and has since then published a magazine (in Danish) four times a year, run NGOs and numerous projects in Mongolia and held around 130 meetings for members. The 25 years anniversary this year was celebrated with a reception (attended by the Danish crown prince and the Mongolian ambassador to Sweden), a conference on Mongolian democracy in the Danish parliament (with visits from Oyun and Sühgerel, see http://www.ft.dk/webtv/video/20131/fpr/tv.2777.aspx ) and a Mongolian film festival (with visits from Mongolian film makers).
*Mongolia is well represented in Danish academia, particularly in anthropology (Morten Pedersen, Ole Bruun, Benedikte Møller Kristensen, Rolf Gilberg and myself)
This may explain the unexpected activity of Danish readers on your blog, myself being one of them. Thanks for a great blog 🙂