By Julian Dierkes
Readership
During 2022 13,000 users viewed 27,000 pages. Both those numbers are down from 2021, perhaps not surprising in a non-election years as elections have generally led to spikes in readership.
In 2022, the top ten origin countries of readers were
- U.S. (27%)
- Mongolia (19%)
- Canada (9%)
- Germany (5%)
- UK (5%)
- China (4%)
- Australia (3%)
- India (2%)
- Japan (2%)
- France (2%)
China’s share of readership continues to grow while Russia dropped out of the top ten during this year of Russian aggression towards a neighbour.
Posts
We wrote 37 posts in the past year. That reflects a general steady output compared to previous years. In this 11th year of maintaining the blog, we have still not missed a single month of writing and we have posted a total of over 775 posts. Energy was flagging a bit by the Spring, in part because many of us had not been able to visit Mongolia since late 2019 due to COVID19-related travel restrictions, but dramatic foreign policy events and some demonstrations in Mongolia quickly re-focused our attention.
In my mind, we wrote a number of posts that will be relevant to analyses of contemporary Mongolia for some years to come.
These included posts on foreign policy
- Marissa Smith tracked initial reactions to Russian aggression against Ukraine in March (post 1 | post 2)
- Bulgan B noted the stir that the observations of a preponderance of Asian faces among Russian soldiers has caused, not just in Mongolia but across Central Asia, an observation that has shifted perceptions of Russia in the region significantly.
- I noted how little attention I had paid to Russophiles over the years of observing Mongolia, something that caused my surprise at the muted government response to Russian imperialism.
- During the summer, Mendee J noted the importance of the Ulaanbaatar Dialogue.
- In November I continued discussions I’d had in Ulaanbaatar in August and November regarding the possibility of Mongolian defiance of Russia.
Domestic politics also caught our attention and demanded analyses
- Perhaps the most surprising development of 2022 was the struggle that a supermajority seemed to represent for the MPP.
Fair to state your point as “#Mongolia is a no-party state” ? pic.twitter.com/qAEerN2V09
— Marissa J. Smith (@marissa_j_smith) December 12, 2022
We also had another year of being able to invite a number of guest posts onto the blog that added significantly to the breadth and depth of our coverage.
Amar A https://t.co/JupmJ5XKz5@jennylander4 https://t.co/Ts0B2xnGfV@Manlaibaatr https://t.co/TT5ori6l90
Peter Fong https://t.co/q5NGy9uLKK
2/2— Julian Dierkes (@jdierkes) December 28, 2022
Some of the posts that had been read most widely in previous years continued to be popular this year as well. The most-read posts in 2022 were:
- Fascist Symbolism in Mongolia, 2020, 2,500 pageviews
- How Popular is Russian, 2016, 950 views
- Mongolia and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, 2022, 600 views
The first two are also among the all-time most read posts.
- Fascist Symbolism, over 9,200 views
- Russian as Foreign Language, over 7,200 page views
- Cars in Mongolia, 2018
Some of the pages we maintain as part of the blog site also continue to be popular, particularly the listing of non-Mongolian mining companies (over 1,400 pageviews in 2022) and our scorecard that bundles various global indices and their ranking of Mongolia.
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