Google provides very little information to bloggers about the web traffic hitting their Blogspot pages. Country of origin, operating system and browser (and by the way, more of you should be using Firefox with its ad blocker) and rough time estimates uncorrelated to the other info. I'd complain, but hey, the price is right. Nevertheless, earlier this year a certain hit from a certain country goosed my fancy and I began writing down the various countries landing on my virtual shores.
Results:
Algeria
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Bangladesh
Belarus
Belgium
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Brazil
Canada
Chile
China
Colombia
Cote d'Ivoire
Croatia
Czechia
Denmark
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Guam
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Latvia
Lebanon
Lithuania
Malaysia
Malawi
Mexico
Myanmar
Netherlands
New Zealand
Nigeria
Norway
Pakistan
Paraguay
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Syria
Thailand
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
United States
Venezuela
Vietnam
Zambia
also:
Unknown Region - I apparently have Martian readers. And they use Linux! Hi there, Xzorngblahrg!
Note I'm all too aware these should not be counted steady "readers" by any stretch of the imagination. The vast majority are incidental keyword hits on page twenty of some Google search or image searches for game screenshots. At under one thousand monthly hits (I'm hilariously unpopular) there's little resolution to work with as well. But, for the purposes of a vague impression of just who's aimlessly browsing the internet, it suits me just fine. In some cases the sample pool amounted to one per country. Tracking numbers by hand for half a year would've been a bit more work than I care to invest, but my own impressions combined with plotting these countries on mapchart still raised a few questions.
For one thing, my hits from the U.S. have been decreasing over the years, despite being the obvious target audience for most of my posts. Americans cannot stand to have their politics challenged, and I do so on a routine basis. In fact, for this past month (likely for the first time ever) I've gotten more hits from France than from the U.S. Also, apparently Canadians like Star Trek? OK, sure, I guess.
For another thing, I get very little from the Hispanic realms, Spain included, and that can't be entirely economic. Has the Internet's hispanophone subculture been developing in isolation? Brazil probably accounts for as many hits as the rest of South America combined (blame my obsession with MOBAs, quite popular among shithead Brazilian brats) and all of Central America's absent. Not entirely surprising given their relatively low populations, but still...
Africa remains Darkest. No surprise there. The few countries which show up tend to track very predictably the list of top African populations and GDP - South Africa, Kenya, Algeria, Nigeria (that prince that kept e-mailing me must be quite the MMO enthusiast) and in the past, a handful of hits from Tanzania and Morocco. But where the hell is Egypt? Is it in deNial?
Southeastern Europe also lags behind what I'd have expected. Croatia, Hungary, Romania make an appearance, though not as much as you'd expect given especially Romanians' infamous penchant for information technology. South of that line, the lights are still out in the Balkans. Or they just really, really, really don't like roleplaying games or science fiction over there. Even Greece barely managed a token appearance and the only hits I get from Italy are obvious crawler bots.
Asia's a mixed bag. Russia's absolutely ripe with crawler bots, and has been ever since I started doing this in 2011. Go-go, industrially polluted punch-drunk hacker rangers! Ukrainians seemed to like me talking about the game STALKER and keep dropping by. The middle-East, Turkey included, may as well be reading by candle-light. Except for surprisingly rising rates of random hits from Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. over the past couple of years. Despite the still-rampant censorship, despite all the controversy, the Saudi modernization drive is achieving... something... I guess? The far east is predictably on the ball. My first regular reader (for a couple of months) back in 2012 was from the Philippines. South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, all drop by once in a while. Each more often than Japan, as a matter of fact, which I would guess is once again a matter of a cultural / linguistic split. Japan's got its own media culture going on. And how!
And then there's China. I was at first surprised at getting hits from places like Zambia or Bangladesh, but started this post when in that same week, even more shockingly China made its appearance. Why should I be surprised? For the most part, being largely random one-time hits, my usage statistics pretty closely track the official statistics on Internet usage, which are themselves fairly predictable by population numbers and general wealth. Scandinavia's all up in your internets, yo. The two most shocking absentees are in fact the top countries on the list: India and China. I get a few Indians, though at about the same rate as Indonesians or Syrians. This is especially jarring given Indians' laughable claim to learning English as a native language. I've gotten as many phone calls from Indian call centers over the past few years as my blog's gotten Indian hits.
I get nothing from China. Two or three hits in six months. Whatever the Chinese (and to a lesser extent Indians) are doing online, it's got little or nothing to do with strategic and roleplaying complexity in PC games, or Tolkien, or with the golden age of Science Fiction, or with webcomics as a youthful mode of expression, or with alternative music from the '90s or with the logical fallacies of modern populism. There are a lot of things that might keep you from roaming freely online. Not being able to afford a computer jumps to mind. Censorship would be another hurdle. Recovering from wars or revolutions tends to play havoc with infrastructure. Nothing quite so surely kills human curiousity, however, as being raised caged in traditionalism, fanatically furthering the interests of your family/tribal unit and trying to outbreed and exterminate all those barbarians out there.
The two largest nations in the world don't care about your culture.
They are expanding, and nothing else matters.
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