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Every year, a little after New Years, I do a post about the previous year of Techdirt traffic and comments. You may notice that we skipped last year’s for 2024. 2025 was so crazy with everything happening, we just didn’t get around to it, and I kept saying I would and then I looked up and it was May and it just didn’t feel right to go back. But now we’re back, closing the books on 2025 in mid-January.
If you’d like to see the details from previous years, here they are: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.
As we’ve done for a few years now, we continue to run without Google Analytics, relying instead on JetPack and Plausible Analytics. And as we always note, all traffic numbers are somewhat unreliable, but they give us a general sense of how things are going (and JetPack & Plausible’s numbers mostly seem to match).
In 2025, our traffic was up noticeably from previous the previous year—around 29% more pageviews compared to 2024. Given that 2025 was the year American democracy started visibly buckling, and we made it clear we wouldn’t back down from covering it, that’s probably not surprising. With so much of our national media falling down on the job, it turns out people will show up when you’re one of the news orgs actually calling out what’s happening.
As is pretty typical, the vast majority of our traffic came from the US (around 75%), followed by the UK, Canada, Australia, India, Germany, and Finland. After that you have the Netherlands, France, Sweden, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, Norway, and Pakistan. The stats say we had… a grand total of three visitors from Antarctica last year. Stay warm, folks. We also had three visitors from Vatican City. Sounds like Pope Leo isn’t yet reading Techdirt, but there’s still time.
In 2025 we published 1,993 posts and garnered 39,750 comments. The post number is about average for us over the past few years. The comment numbers are down a bit, even as traffic was up, which is likely due to some anti-trolling/anti-spam measures we took last May when a few trolls (and spammers) got a bit out of control. We also wrote about 1.74 million words in 2025, our most since 2016.
It also appears to be an unstoppable trend that Techdirt’s posts only get longer and longer, reaching 871 words per post on average last year. The trend here is not subtle.
As for where our traffic comes from, I’m always proudest of the fact that more than half of our traffic is direct traffic, not referred from elsewhere, meaning that we have a loyal audience that comes to check out Techdirt unmediated by various algorithms.
In terms of traffic referrals, the largest single source was Reddit. Search engines (mainly Google) were also significant. After that our two biggest referrers were Bluesky and Fark (yes, Fark!). It’s nice to see Bluesky continuing to send tons of traffic, reminding us that it’s the only major social media site that doesn’t downgrade and suppress links. We also got significant traffic from Flipboard, Google News, Hacker News, and the NewsBreak app.
Much further down on the referrals, X, Substack, and LinkedIn all gave us roughly the equivalent amount of traffic to each other (less than 10% of what Bluesky and Fark sent us). Also… ChatGPT. It’s a little bit less than X/Substack/LinkedIn, but I’m guessing by next year it will surpass those. Wikipedia & Threads each sent about the same amount of traffic as ChatGPT did.
Down towards the bottom of the list there are random blogs, news sites, a few RSS readers, and also Mastodon. They’re not that big compared to the others, but they’re all still sending some visitors our way.
Our traffic now appears to be almost exactly evenly split between computers and mobile devices. Last year it was a 51%/49% split with the slight edge going to desktops. In terms of specific operating systems, iOS tops the overall list, followed by Windows. Then Android, Mac, and Linux. There’s a much smaller group of folks at the bottom of the list using Chromebooks.
Interestingly, our most popular day for traffic was Thursday (18% of views), and the best hour was 9:00 AM (7% of views).
Okay, onto the lists!
Top Ten Stories, by unique pageviews, on Techdirt for 2025:
The pattern here is not exactly subtle. Seven of the top ten stories are about the ongoing collapse of constitutional governance. The TikTok stories are really the same story twice… and in some way are directly connected to the collapse of the United States. And the only entry that isn’t directly about authoritarianism is about how bad-faith actors exploit free speech norms — which, well, same theme wearing different clothes.
2025’s Top Ten Stories, by comment volume:
The fact that we had two of the weekly comment roundups ending up on the most commented list, both of which were from last January, tells you how we had some trolls who took it upon themselves to wreck the comments, especially on those posts early last year. Also, as we point out nearly every year, the fact that the list of highest commented posts is almost entirely different from the list of most visited posts seems noteworthy.
Now, to the personal commenter leaderboards:
2025 Top Commenters, by comment volume:
Stephen T. Stone continues to dominate the comment leaderboard, though with fewer comments than in previous years, probably since there were fewer troll comments to respond to. It’s also nice to see some new names on the list this year.
Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the lightbulb icon
(Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the icon)
Some familiar names here, though nice to see MrWilson move up in the rankings. Also a shoutout to Bloof for having the highest percentage of comments getting the insightful icon.
Top 10 Funniest Commenters, based on how many times they got the laughing face icon
(Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the icon)
Interesting to see MrWilson take the top spot for funny this year. As always, it’s much harder to get the funny icon than the insightful one. Last year wasn’t a huge year for humor, not surprisingly. But looking at how few “funny” comments were needed to get on the top 10 list, seems like some of you could jump onto it next year with just a few more funny comments. Let’s get some gallows humor going. Also, shoutout to Rico R. for having a very high percentage of their comments getting the funny icon.
And, with that, the 2025 books are officially closed. 2026 is already a few weeks in and shows no signs of being any less exhausting (quite the opposite), so we’ll see you in the comments. Thanks to everyone who reads and debates, and especially to those of you who support our work here.
Filed Under: 2025, comments, stats, techdirt
Companies: techdirt
On Tuesday, I wrote about how we were upgrading our daily email newsletter—the one we’ve had for decades but never actually promoted. Thousands of you had signed up just by spotting the little email icon. We figured more might be interested if we actually talked about it. We’d upgraded the tech, written a whole post about it, and figured people would start signing up.
And then… crickets. For two days straight, the only “new” signup was a test I’d run with my own email address. Which was, you know, not ideal. It was possible that no more people wanted to sign up and we’d maxed out on subscribers already. But… that seemed unlikely.
Then we got a few reports from people saying they tried to sign up but got error messages. Which is, generally speaking, not what you want.
It turns out that we had a little bug: users who were signed into their Techdirt account could sign up for the newsletter. But if you were signed out (as most readers are) well… you got the error. There’s some sort of QA lesson in that, and yes, we should have tested it logged out as well, but there’s always something you miss.
All that is to say, we’ve now fixed this, and ever since we did, the signups have been flowing in. So I thought I’d do another quick post and say that, no, really, you can sign up for the emailed daily newsletter if you want it!
Also worth noting: a bunch of people said they prefer RSS or just visiting the site directly, and that’s great too. We’ve had full-text RSS feeds for over two decades—long before most sites even understood what they were—and the site itself is always there. The point isn’t to force you into one distribution channel. If anything, we’re doing the opposite: giving you the option to consume Techdirt however you actually want to, rather than locking you into whatever method happens to be most fashionable… or profitable. That’s increasingly rare, and it’s not an accident.
We just want you to be able to enjoy Techdirt whichever way works best for you.
Filed Under: email, newsletter, techdirt
Companies: techdirt
Look, we get it. Your inbox is probably drowning in newsletters right now. Every publication, influencer, and their cousin’s dog walker has suddenly discovered the revolutionary concept of… sending you emails with stuff to read. Who could have predicted that people might want content delivered directly to them?
Well, actually, we could have. Because we’ve been doing this since 1997.
Here’s the thing that’s particularly amusing about the great newsletter “revolution” of the past few years: it’s being hailed as some brilliant innovation that will save media from the tyranny of social media algorithms and platform dependency. Meanwhile, we’ve been quietly proving that exact point for almost three decades.
Back when Techdirt started, it literally was a newsletter. Email was the primary way we distributed things for the first couple of years. But somewhere along the way, we kind of forgot to mention that we still send out a daily email with the full text of every single post. We just had a tiny email logo in the upper righthand corner, and many thousands of you actually subscribed to get those full text daily newsletters.
Not excerpts. Not teasers designed to drive clicks. The entire damn thing, delivered to your inbox every day.
While everyone else spent the last few years “discovering” that newsletters are the future of media (again), we just kept quietly sending ours out to all of you who had subscribed, but never once mentioning its existence in the past couple of decades.
We’ve finally updated the tools we use to manage and send the newsletter, which means we now have actual flexibility to do more interesting things with it. Previously, our newsletter was essentially “here’s today’s posts in email form”—which, to be clear, is still exactly what it is today. We made sure that step one was just recreating what we already had been sending, because why fix what isn’t broken?
But now we have the infrastructure to potentially experiment with different formats, frequencies, or focus areas if that’s what you want.
The core offering remains the same: subscribe, and every day you’ll get the full text of everything we published, delivered to your inbox.
Now that we have better tools, we’re curious about what else you might want to see from our newsletter. Weekly roundups? Deep dives into specific topics? Digest emails instead of full text?
We’ve got some ideas, but we’d rather hear from you. Drop a comment below and let us know what would make a Techdirt newsletter more valuable to you. Do you want more analysis, different formatting, or just more reminders of all the crazy stories we cover?
We’d like to hear from people who receive the current email with all our posts (are there other supplementary newsletters you’d want to sign up for as well?) and from those who aren’t interested in the current email (is there something else you would want to receive?)
For now, though, the main thing is this: if you want Techdirt delivered to your inbox every day, you can do that now, and it’s easier than before when you had to hunt around the site for that tiny email icon.
You can subscribe from this page, or by using the widget at the bottom of this post, or via the signup form in the right-hand navigation bar at the top of any page. It’s free, it’s daily, and it’s the full text of everything we publish.
And yes, we realize the irony of writing a blog post to promote our newsletter that will then be included in our newsletter. But let’s not get too deep in the weeds on that.
Now, what other newsletter features would actually be useful to you?
Filed Under: email, newsletter, techdirt
Companies: techdirt
This week, we’ve got a cross-post episode of Mike’s appearance on Kevin Williamson’s How The World Works podcast. Kevin conducted a wide-ranging interview that covers some of the earliest days of Techdirt, the blog’s evolution, and many of the important topics we cover today — and you can listen to the whole conversation here on this week’s episode.
You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.
Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.
Filed Under: kevin williamson, podcast, techdirt
While political reporters are still doing their view-from-nowhere “Democrats say this, Republicans say that” dance, tech and legal journalists have been watching an unfortunately recognizable plan unfold — a playbook we’re all too familiar with. We’ve seen how technology can be wielded to consolidate power, how institutional guardrails can be circumvented through technical and legal workarounds, and how smoke and mirrors claims about “innovation” can mask old-fashioned power grabs. It’s a playbook we watched Musk perfect at Twitter, and now we’re seeing it deployed on a national scale.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a few people reach out about our coverage these days. Most have been very supportive of what we’ve been covering (in fact, people have been strongly encouraging us to keep it up), but a few asked questions regarding what Techdirt is focused on these days, and how much we were leaning into covering “politics.”
When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.
We’ve always covered the intersection of technology, innovation, and policy (27+ years and counting). Sometimes that meant writing about patents or copyright, sometimes about content moderation, sometimes about privacy. But what happens when the fundamental systems that make all of those conversations possible start breaking down? When the people dismantling those systems aren’t even pretending to replace them with something better?
But there’s more to it than that.
It’s difficult to explain how much it matters that we’ve seen this movie before. (Well, technically, we’ve seen the beta version — what’s happening now is way more troubling.) When you’ve spent years watching how some tech bros break the rules in pursuit of personal and economic power at the expense of safety and user protections, all while wrapping themselves in the flag of “innovation,” you get pretty good at spotting the pattern.
Take two recent stories that perfectly illustrate the difference in coverage. First, there’s the TikTok ban. Political reporters focused on which party would benefit from the ban, and who would get credit for being “tough on China” — the usual horse-race nonsense. Tech and law reporters, meanwhile, were highlighting how the legislation would actually weaken security protections and create dangerous precedents for government intervention in private companies. (Not to mention how it would undermine decades of US work promoting an open internet.)
Or take what’s happening at the FCC right now. The traditional media keeps repeating the claims that Brendan Carr is a “free speech warrior,” because that’s what Donald Trump called him. But if you’ve been covering tech policy for a while, you know full well that Carr isn’t actually a believer in free speech. Quite the opposite.
Carr made it clear he wants to be America’s top censor, but cleverly wrapped it in misleading language about free speech. Inexperienced political reporters just repeated those misleading claims. Then he started doing exactly what he promised: going after companies whose speech he seemed to feel was too supportive of Democrats. And now some of those same media companies who failed to cover Carr accurately are falling in line, caving to threats from the administration.
This is the kind of thing tech and law reporters spot immediately, because we’ve seen this all play out before. When someone talks about “free speech” while actively working to control speech, that’s not a contradiction or a mistake — it’s the point. It’s about consolidating power while wrapping it in the language of freedom as a shield to fool the gullible and the lazy.
This is why it’s been the tech and legal press that have been putting in the work, getting the scoops, and highlighting what’s actually going on, rather than just regurgitation administration propaganda without context or analysis (which hasn’t stopped the administration from punishing them).
Connecting these dots is basically what we do here at Techdirt.
One of the craziest bits about covering the systematic dismantling of democracy is this: the people doing the dismantling frequently tell you exactly what they’re going to do. They’re almost proud of it. They just wrap it in language that makes it sound like the opposite. (Remember when Musk said he was buying Twitter to protect free speech? And then banned journalists and sued researchers for calling out his nonsense? Same playbook.)
Good reporters can parse that. Bad reporters fail at it time and time again.
But what’s happening now is even more extreme and more terrifying. Something that even experts in democratic collapse didn’t see coming. Normally when democracies fall apart, there’s also a playbook. A series of predictable steps involving the military, or the courts, or sometimes both.
But what’s happening in the US right now is some sort of weird hybrid of the kind of power grabs we’ve seen in the tech industry, combined with a more traditional collapse of democratic institutions.
The destruction is far more systematic and dangerous than many seem to realize. Even Steven Levitsky, the author of How Democracies Die — who has literally written the book on how democracies collapse — admits the speed and scope of America’s institutional collapse has exceeded his worst predictions. And his analysis points to something we’ve been specifically warning about: the unprecedented concentration of political, economic, and technological power in the hands of Elon Musk and his circle of loyal hatchet men as they dismantle democratic guardrails.
We’re pretty screwed. A couple of things are a little worse than I anticipated. One is that while we knew the Republicans would not put up many obstacles, they have been even weaker than I thought. That the Congress is basically shutting itself down in the wake of the executive branch usurping its power is also really stunning. The Republican abdication has been worse than I expected, and I thought it would be bad.
The second thing I didn’t anticipate was the role of Musk. I don’t think anybody quite could have anticipated it. That article drew on 20 years of research on competitive authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world. The kinds of stuff we predicted, a lot of which has come to pass, are strategies that have been carried out in literally dozens of other cases. But Musk is pretty new. This is something that I don’t really have a model to understand. There’s a sort of technological frontier element to this that’s a little frightening. We don’t know what he’s going to do with data. And frankly, at least in democracies, I’ve never seen a concentration of political, economic, and media power as vast as this.
This is why tech journalism’s perspective is so crucial right now. We’ve spent decades documenting how technology and entrepreneurship can either strengthen or undermine democratic institutions. We understand the dangers of concentrated power in the digital age. And we’ve watched in real-time as tech leaders who once championed innovation and openness now actively work to consolidate control and dismantle the very systems that enabled their success.
I know that some folks in the comments will whine that this is “political” or that it’s an overreaction. And it is true that there have been times in the past when people have overreacted to things happening in DC.
This is not one of those times.
If you do not recognize that mass destruction of fundamental concepts of democracy and the US Constitution happening right now, you are either willfully ignorant or just plain stupid. I can’t put it any clearer than that.
This isn’t about politics — it’s about the systematic dismantling of the very infrastructure that made American innovation possible. For those in the tech industry who supported this administration thinking it would mean less regulation or more “business friendly” policies: you’ve catastrophically misread the situation (which many people tried to warn you about). While overregulation (which, let’s face it, we didn’t really have) can be bad, it’s nothing compared to the destruction of the stable institutional framework that allowed American innovation to thrive in the first place.
There’s something important to understand about innovation. It doesn’t actually happen in a vacuum. The reason Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley wasn’t because a bunch of genius inventors happened to like California weather. It was because of a complex web of institutions that made innovation possible: courts that would enforce contracts (but not non-competes, allowing ideas to spread quickly and freely across industries), universities that shared research, a financial system that could fund new ideas, and laws that let people actually try those ideas out. And surrounding it all: a fairly stable economy, stability in global markets and (more recently) a strong belief in a global open internet.
And now we’re watching Musk, Trump, and their allies destroy these foundations. They operate under the dangerous delusion of the “great man” theory of innovation — the false belief that revolutionary changes come solely from lone geniuses, rather than from the complex interplay of open systems, diverse perspectives, and stable institutions that actually drives progress.
The reality has always been much messier. Innovation happens when lots of different people can try lots of different ideas. When information flows freely. When someone can start a company without worrying that the government will investigate them for criticizing an oligarch. When diverse perspectives can actually contribute to the conversation. You know — all the things that are currently under attack.
But you need a stable economy and stable infrastructure to make that work. And you need an openness to ideas and collaboration and (gasp) diversity to actually getting the most out of people.
There are, of course, other stories happening in the world. And it has been frustrating that we haven’t been able to cover some of the stories we’d normally cover. I have about 700 tabs currently open, many of which contain stories I’d like to write about, some of which might seem closer to traditional Techdirt subject matter.
But right now, the story that matters most is how the dismantling of American institutions threatens everything else we cover. When the fundamental structures that enable innovation, protect civil liberties, and foster open dialogue are under attack, every other tech policy story becomes secondary.
What we’re witnessing isn’t just another political cycle or policy debate — it’s an organized effort to destroy the very systems that have made American innovation possible. Whether this is by design, or by incompetence, doesn’t much matter (though it’s likely a combination of both). Unlike typical policy fights where we can disagree on the details while working within the system, this attack aims to demolish the system itself.
Remember all those tech CEOs who thought they could control Trump? All those VCs who figured they could profit from chaos? All those business leaders who decided that “woke institutions” were a bigger threat than authoritarian power grabs? They’re learning a very expensive lesson about the difference between creative destruction and just plain destruction.
We’re going to keep covering this story because, frankly, it’s the only story that matters right now, and one that not everyone manages to see clearly. The political press may not understand what’s happening (or may be too afraid to say it out loud), but those of us who’ve spent decades studying how technology and power interact? We see it and we can’t look away.
So, here’s the bottom line: when WaPo’s opinion pages are being gutted and tech CEOs are seeking pre-approval from authoritarians, the line between “tech coverage” and “saving democracy” has basically disappeared. It’s all the same thing.
We’re going to keep doing this work because someone has to. Because understanding how technology and power interact isn’t just an academic exercise anymore — it’s about whether we’ll have an innovation economy left when this is all over.
If you think this kind of coverage matters — if you believe we need voices willing to connect these dots and call out these threats — then help us keep doing it. You can become a Friend of Techdirt, support us on Patreon, grab some merch, or even back our card game (while it’s still available for pre-order…)
The future of American innovation isn’t just another story we cover. It’s the story. And we’re going to keep telling it, whether the powers that be like it or not.
Filed Under: authoritarianism, coup, coverage, donald trump, elon musk, innovation, institutions, journalism, politics, techdirt
It’s been a few weeks, but we’re back! Although the podcast schedule is still going to be sporadic for a little while longer (Mike explains further in the intro) we’ve got a couple cross-post episodes lined up, starting with today’s. Recently, Mike joined Ed Zitron on his Better Offline podcast for a far-reaching interview about (among other things) the history of Techdirt, the future of Bluesky, and the origins of the Streisand Effect. You can listen to the whole conversation here on this week’s episode.
You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.
Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.
Filed Under: better offline, ed zitron, podcast, streisand effect, techdirt
Companies: bluesky
Just a quick post to note an amazing (to me!) milestone. At some point last week (on Wednesday basically), this site passed over two million comments. That is since the site’s commenting feature launched in 1999. If you want the quick history: we started a newsletter 27 years ago on August 23, 1997, and it became a website in the spring of 1998, but we didn’t shift to the blog format with comments until March of 1999.
So, that’s basically two million comments across 25 years. Holy shit, that’s a lot of comments. Thank you to all of you who participate, especially the ones who add value with thoughtful, insightful, and funny comments. That’s what we’re always looking for.
It’s kind of incredible to me that this has lasted this long, especially given just how much the web has changed over this time, including how commenting has changed. People don’t remember this at all, but when Techdirt launched in the blog format (using Slashcode 0.3), it posted the email address publicly if a user entered their email address in the form. Because in those days, that’s what people expected. The idea that people might want to keep their email addresses private, or that spam would be a problem, wasn’t even part of the thought process!
How far we’ve come.
I had thought about figuring out which comment was the actual two millionth, but that’s complicated by lots of factors, including that there is still plenty of comment spam that we miss. Just a few days before we hit the two million comment mark, I happened across an article from years ago that had about 50 comment spam messages that we had missed at the time, but which I promptly deleted. So what was the actual two millionth comment isn’t really definable, as I could very well find another cache of old spam on another day and delete them as well.
And, of course, we get somewhere on the order of 5,000 attempts at comment spam a day which are blocked before they ever get on the site. Only a very small percentage of spam gets through (though it’s still frustrating). If we were counting the number of attempted comments, including spam, then we’d be many millions higher.
Still, thank you to the community here of (mostly) productive commenters who keep things interesting and keep us on our toes here. The community aspects of this site are always what make it the best.
Every year a little after New Years, I do a post about the previous year of Techdirt traffic and comments, looking at what people were interested in, what commenters were highly rated, etc. I know most sites put this out towards the end of the year, but I remain a purist and wait until after the new year begins to get all the stats. I usually try to do it a few days after New Year’s, but it’s a long process, and this year I’ve had a very busy start to the year (though, looking back, last year’s also came out about two weeks after the new year started as well).
If you’d like to see the details from previous years, here they are: 2022, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010.
Two years ago was the first year we did it without Google Analytics (which we ditched as we tried to remove as much Google as possible from the site). And last year it was a bit trickier, because in early 2022 we had switched from our old, homemade platform to WordPress, and that mucked up some of the stat tracking, and left me trying to piece things together.
This time we have a full year of data again, coming from two separate tools: Automattic’s JetPack and Plausible, which provides very simple, privacy-protective analytics data without feeding it into an advertising juggernaut.
As is pretty typical, about 72% of our traffic comes from the US, followed by Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, India, the Netherlands, France, New Zealand, and Sweden. The differences from last year are marginal, but Germany was behind India last year, and Brazil was in the top ten (at spot 10) while New Zealand was not. Brazil was 15th this year, trailing Ireland, Spain, Italy and Switzerland. The top Asian country was Japan (one spot behind Brazil) followed by Singapore (though Japan and Singapore had nearly identical traffic).
In 2023 we published 2,007 posts (a tiny bit down from last year, but close) and garnered 61,056 comments on those posts, an average of 30.4 comments per post. Given commenting rates, it’s likely that this year we’ll pass 2 million total comments (!!!) somewhere in the summertime.
Of course, even as we published fewer posts, they got longer. Our average words per post was 798, up from 774 the year before. So even as we published fewer overall posts, we published more words. Just for fun, check out this chart:
Already, for 2024, we’re averaging (well) over 800 words per post, though who knows if that will stick. But, still, most people don’t realize for the first few years I though all Techdirt posts should only be one paragraph. That… changed.
In terms of traffic referrals, I always highlight that, by far, the largest source of our traffic is direct traffic. We never played social media games, trying to goose our traffic that way. And while that maybe put us behind others in overall traffic, our readers tend to be more loyal, rather than drive-by. It looks like approximately 50% of our traffic was direct, with no referrals. Google search sent about 17% of our traffic, and Google News drove about 6%.
After that, we did still receive about 5% of our traffic from ExTwitter even though we don’t post there any more (either personally or from the Techdirt account, since Elon took away the API to do so). Reddit and Smartnews each drove about the same level of traffic as ExTwitter. I honestly still don’t know what Smartnews is, but every year it sends a decent amount of traffic. Same with the “NewsBreakApp.” No idea, but thanks for the traffic.
This year, Flipboard also sent a decent amount of traffic, which is cool, given how that company is embracing the fediverse (something I’m hoping to write more about soon). After that we had HackerNews, Bluesky (my main daily social media app, which is getting close to fully opening to the public) and even Substack. Fark and LinkedIn both also sent a surprising amount of traffic.
Traffic from other publications had Ars Technica leading the way, followed by The Verge, Naked Capitalism, Daring Fireball, Kottke, Techmeme, and AboveTheLaw. I guess Techmeme is more of an aggregator, but it feels appropriate here. I like to see some of these oldschool blogs (Daring Fireball! Kottke!) in the list.
In search, after Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing were next in the list, but there were large periods of last year where Techdirt was missing from both Bing and DuckDuckGo (it looks like we’re currently back).
It’s been kinda crazy to watch the transition to mobile over the years (and we long resisted having a mobile-friendly site). But in 2023, it looks like 69.3% of Techdirt’s traffic was from mobile devices (phones or tablets), and just 30.7% from computers (desktop or laptop).
In terms of OS, 37.7% were Android, 31.6% were iOS. 18.1% were Windows. 10.7% were Mac. Linux was at 1.6% (though I just set up my laptop to dual boot into Linux, so we’ll see if I can bump that number up this year). ChromeOS rounds it out at just 0.5%.
Okay, onto the lists!
Top Ten Stories, by unique pageviews, on Techdirt for 2023:
I’d say there’s a good mix of expected ones and surprises in there. It does seem like “companies behaving badly” often gets a fair bit of attention from readers…
2023’s Top Ten Stories, by comment volume:
Also noticing a bit of a pattern here (and you might too if you went into the comments). We sure do have some extremely committed commenters.
And… once again, as we point out almost every year, there’s no overlap between the highest trafficked posts and the posts with the most comments, even if there’s a common theme in both lists.
Now, to the personal commenter leaderboards:
2023 Top Commenters, by comment volume:
Some expected names on that list and a few new ones as well. Second year in a row that Stephen T. Stone was atop the list, though he’s been hovering around the top 3 for years. But this is also the second year in a row that he posted nearly double the comments of the second place finisher, effectively looping the pack. Stephen, you could create another account, split your posts, and you’d still be in spots one and two…
Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the lightbulb icon:
Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the icon
Same top three as last year, and the same top three (in varying orders) as it has been for years. It’s great to have a crew of reliable, insightful commenters here.
Top 10 Funniest Commenters, based on how many times they got the laughing face icon:
Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the icon
Well done. As always, it’s harder to get the funny icon than the insightful one (perhaps we should fiddle with the thresholds?) But if you’re even remotely funny, it seems like it should be possible to get on this list next year.
Also, a shoutout to Thad for having a consistently high percentage of comments getting either insightful or funny, or both. Pretty impressive.
And, with that, the 2023 books are officially closed. 2024 is just a couple weeks in and I see that the competition is already pretty fierce for next year’s lists…
Welp, here we go again. Last month I wrote about how Techdirt had been deleted from both Bing and DuckDuckGo. Over on the discussion at HackerNews, DDG’s CEO and founder, Gabriel Weinberg, jumped in to the conversation to note that this wasn’t intentional (which we never suspected it was). The resulting conversation on HackerNews is actually pretty interesting, as it appears there was some level of misunderstanding among many users about how much DuckDuckGo relies on Bing for its underlying web search.
Either way, a few hours later DuckDuckGo added back… a single link(!) to Techdirt’s front page, which we mentioned in an update. The next day, I heard from a couple people who said they had reached out to people at Microsoft, and I was told that this sometimes happen, and that the Bing team will eventually fix it (though it might happen faster if something gets public attention). Either way, about a day after I had written about Techdirt being erased, we were back in both Bing and DuckDuckGo and I considered it a one-off bug that had been fixed.
But… it’s back. I happened to just check on Bing and saw that we’re gone again (though now there’s also a big obnoxious box trying to get me to chat):
But, this time it’s weird, because it says there are 2,030 results (should be a lot more!) and then says “some results have been removed,” but it shows no results at all. If you click on the “2” at the bottom, it just takes you right back to this exact same view.
As for DDG, it still displays the one single link to our homepage and nothing else:
While that may be better than nothing, it’s pretty close to nothing. We do still get a fair bit of traffic from people searching for particular stories and now neither Bing nor DDG will send people to those stories. I did some searches on our most popular articles, like the Elon speedrun and the “you’re wrong about 230” and… all the results send people to other sites talking about our article.
Which isn’t really great.
Meanwhile, Google returns 94,900 results which is much closer to our total number of pages.
I’d really like for there to be real competition for Google out there in the search market, but it shouldn’t require me having to nag a trillion dollar company in Redmond every few weeks to put me back into their index.
Filed Under: bing, search index, search results, techdirt
Companies: duckduckgo, microsoft, techdirt
Every year, a little after New Years, I try to do a post looking at the previous years results on Techdirt, what people were interested in, what commenters were rated highly and whatnot. I always wait until after New Years (unlike some other sites!) to make sure I have the full year’s data. This year, it took a little longer than usual as I’ve been pretty busy with some other stuff. Also, I had to do a bit more piecing of things together. As you may recall, last year, we finally switched from our old, home-built platform to WordPress. We’re still working out some of the bugs and quirks from the move, but slowly getting around to adding new features. But one of the issues is that we didn’t have a full, consistent analytics setup for the entire year, so I’m piecing things together from two separate analytics systems. As you’ll recall, two years ago we dumped Google Analytics in our ongoing quest to rely less on the biggest tech companies for services.
If you’d like to see the details from previous years, here you go: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.
The first thing we cover is where our visitors came from… and the top of the list isn’t very surprising and has stayed pretty steady. 72% of our visits were from the US, with 6% from the UK and 5% from Canada. That’s in the range where we usually see it. Australia and India follow at 2% of our traffic. The next five are Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Brazil. I will note that one of the other analytics packages we’re testing (for which I only have a few months of data towards the end of the year) shows Brazil actually having the second most traffic, but I’m not sure that’s accurate.
I sometimes have fun looking through the bottom of the list, but honestly, that’s probably just a waste of time. The data on devices and browsers used to access Techdirt is a bit of a mess, though we should have much better data next year. However, it does look like the trend towards viewing via mobile devices continues to accelerate.
Some new stats that we didn’t have (easy) access to in previous years: in 2022, we published 2,056 posts and received just about 62,000 comments. Not bad! Those 2,056 posts totaled about 1.6 million words. That’s 774 words per post. Looking back at past data… that’s the longest average post we’ve had since the beginning of Techdirt. The data actually shows that our posts have tended to get longer each and every year with only a few exceptions. I honestly had no idea. I also don’t put much stake in overall traffic numbers, but our traffic increased a ton towards the end of last year. Basically from September onward, we were breaking traffic records.
The last few years I’ve given a handy pie chart for where our traffic comes from. I can’t quite do that this year (hopefully I can bring it back next year). Once again, we pride ourselves on having more than half of our traffic come direct (you loyal visitors coming right back, rather than relying on us popping up somewhere), and that still holds true. After that, search drove plenty of traffic, with (of course) Google driving most of that, followed by Bing and DuckDuckGo. Other traffic drivers were Twitter, SmartNews, Reddit, Google News, Facebook, and Hacker News. Yes, Facebook has always been a low traffic driver for us. We never spent much time cultivating traffic there like every other news site, and thus… we don’t much care how they handle news when every few months the company changes its mind.
And with that, let’s get to the stuff everyone looks forward to. The lists.
Top Ten Stories, by unique pageviews, on Techdirt for 2022:
This list is a bit different than in the past, in that much of it is kinda dominated by one story (and the next few posts down the list in traffic are related to that same story as well). That always makes me a bit nervous, as I prefer it when Techdirt is getting a pretty broad base of interest, rather than just focusing on a single thing. Still, the stories that did seem to catch on and go viral mostly tended to have our unique… Techdirtian spin on things. Which is something useful to think about for this year.
2022’s Top Ten Stories, by comment volume:
I am sensing a pattern here. People have strong opinions about the various laws trying to force websites to host content. And then some strong opinions about Twitter. I was somewhat surprised by the Little Mermaid story making the top 10 comment list, but then I looked and saw that our resident “very confused about copyright law” commenter went a little nuts on that one.
Also, despite the overlap in topics between these two top 10 lists, note that (once again) the top stories in traffic are not the same as the top stories in comments. Comments do not equal traffic. Sometimes they just equal flame wars between a small group of people.
And now to the really important lists. The comment leaderboards:
2022 Top Commenters, by comment volume:
Definitely some carry-overs from the previous year, though PaulT, who has been somewhere on the leaderboard since we started this and was back in 1st place last year after a few years down the list, dropped back down to 5th place.
Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the lightbulb icon:
Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the icon
The same top three (though in a different order) as we’ve had for years. It’s perhaps not surprising Stephen T. Stone took first place this year, after his clean sweep of the most insightful comments of the year. Thanks guys for being truly key to providing real insight and value in the comments.
Top 10 Funniest Commenters, based on how many times they got the LOL icon:
Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the icon
Once again, it’s way more difficult to be consistently funny. Kudos to Thad who has stayed on this list for years with a consistently higher percentage than many others (and this year, much higher than normal). Also noteworthy are the two new entrants who both had an incredibly high percentage of their comments ranked as funny: Cat Daddy and (especially) Flakbait. Indeed, you have to go back to 2017 to find anyone with as high a percentage as those two (and, actually, Thad as well). Nice going guys! Keep the funny coming.
And, with that (a little later than usual) the 2022 books are closed and we’re off to the 2023 races. And some of you are already working hard on making next year’s lists…
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