Happy New Year from Corinthian Matters! WordPress has kindly provided an annual report of activities related to this blog over the last year, but I love to crunch data and I was curious to know a bit more about how people were finding and using this site—so I went to the statistics mine for more information. Here is what I found.
Most people found Corinthianmatters through Google searches—especially for photos of the Corinthia. The Google bots discovered the images on this site about two or three months ago and the number of visitors since then has doubled.
Leaving aside image searches, the top ten category searches in 2011 point to a varied interest in Corinthian antiquities, territory, and religion:
1. Diolkos (20%)
2. ApostlePaul, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and the first Christian communities at Corinth (12%)
3. Niketas Ooryphas and the authors who wrote about him: George Cedrenus, Theophanes Cont, Madrid Skylitzes, Vita Basilii, Chronicon Maius (11%)
4. Aerial photos, maps, and plans (7%)
5. Isthmus (5%)
6. Corinthian colonies: Butrint, Dyrrachium, Corfu, Epidamnus (5%)
7. Lechaion (5%)
8. Ancient Corinth (5%)
9. Erastus (3%)
10. ASCSA Excavations(3%)
Obviously, how people find the site relates to what content is available—and 2010 was the year of the diolkos. But these stats also reflect demand as well. While our entries about New Testament materials were not the most numerous, they attracted a huge share of the searches. And surprisingly, the few posts about the Corinthian colonies along the Adriatic and Ionian seas generated quite a bit of traffic.
Apart from search engines, most traffic came to the site through shared links via friends and contacts on Facebook (20%), and random links through WordPress (18%). There were, though, a good mix of outside referrals from sites dedicated to both Mediterranean archaeology and New Testament studies: Rogueclassicism (9%), American School of Classical Studies (7%), New Testament Perspectives (4%), Bible Places (4%), Cryptotheology (3%), New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World (3%), and many others.
It is hard to assess the most popular post of 2011, since most people only ever view the Home Page, which changes from day to day. But the pages and posts that got the most traffic were a surprising mix of maps (#1), photos (2, 5) and multimedia (4), current scholarship (3, 6), archaeology news (7, 8), and scholarship summaries (10).
2. Acrocorinth
4. Intro to Corinth Educational Video (with diolkos)
5. Church of the Panagia in Ancient Corinth
6. Corinthian History and Archaeology: 2010 Publications
7. Service Excavations Unearth Corinth City Walls (and other buildings)
9. The Search for the Historical Erastus
10. Niketas Ooryphas and the Diolkos of Corinth, Part I
We already have a lot in the queue for 2012 and plan to add more content, news, bibliography, and reviews. Next week or the week after, we’ll run our annual publications list for different categories of Corinthian scholarship.
Corinthian Matters 