2015 at “me + richard armitage” in review, part one

I have probably spent less time looking at blog stats in 2015 than I ever did — partly because I had no time, partly because after I passed 5 million page views, much more than I ever expected I would do back when twenty people a day were reading the blog, I became much less interested in them.

WordPress.com always sends a “year in review” message which they suggest one should publish on the blog. I’ve never done that, but I usually have published a list of the most viewed posts written in that particular year. In 2015, the most viewed posts reflected very closely what I’d been thinking about blogging about Richard Armitage in 2015.

1. Four pictures of Richard Armitage that some fans felt it was disrespectful of me to post (January 11, 2015). This is a never-ending controversy among fans — what is okay to post, what not?
2. Could you dig the hole you put yourself in just a little deeper, Richard Armitage? (April 1, 2015). Response to Armitage’s request that fans make their tweets mum-and-child-safe.
3. I wish you would turn the discussion on its head for once, Richard Armitage (December 19, 2015). Response to Armitage’s remarks in the Mirror interview.
4. #RichardArmitage’s lunchtime buzzkill (June 4, 2015). Respond to Armitage’s first piece for Cybersmile.org.
5. NYC Theater insider thinks “ancient play” will be Salome with Richard Armitage as Herod. Speculation on Armitage’s plans for a play with Yaël Farber (May 12, 2015).
6. Trying to decide if should rescind my general approval of Richard Armitage’s footwear choices (April 21, 2015). Armitage’s purply shoes in the Toronto airport. Raised again the spectre of which photos may be published.
7. This is why I hate you, Richard Armitage (January 15, 2015). Despite the title, possibly the most positive of the posts in the 2015 top ten.
8. “Richard’s huge”: A few bullet points from Anna Madeley’s interview for Digital Theatre Plus (April 11, 2015). Summary of material behind a pay wall.
9. “Switch the [Richard Armitage] off” (June 12, 2015). Response to Richard Armitage’s second piece for Cybersmile.org. This post reflected an absolute nadir for me in feelings about Armitage.
10. How we make others feel about themselves (April 26, 2015). Discussion of the passive aggressive elements of the Golden Rule as they applied to one of Armitage’s prescriptions for fan behavior.

Now, this post makes the year look a particular way. If this were your picture of the blog, you might forget that I blogged weekly with a detailed discussion of Armitage’s performance in Hannibal — or that I also wrote over a dozen spoof posts — or that I started writing about the Armitage fandom as a religion. I also continued my sporadic news provision. None of those posts made the top thirty (the first year that a spoof post hasn’t made it into the top ten, incidentally).

To a greater extent — although this is not the whole story — I think these statistics reflect the fact that the top referrers this year (I think for the first time ever) were my own social media presence on other platforms. That would have been unthinkable five years ago (I didn’t even get Twitter until I’d been blogging for over a year, and didn’t use it much for that first year, either). I’m not saying that all of my readers come to me via those mechanisms (thanks to all of you diehards!) but I think casual readers do, so to some extent the “top ten” reflect the interest of casual readers more than the regulars, and what do casual readers click on? Controversy and news / gossip. I backed way off from news provision in 2015 (both out of necessity and out of inclination) and so there was a corresponding change in the sort of post that could be seen, as well as in the number of total page views, which was down from 2014 (which also relates to less constant news about and fewer big events in Armitage’s career). But as the Twitter audience grew (in particular) there has also been a qualitative change in the readership, I think. I was thinking today that I’m on something like the fourth generation of commentators in this tiny community, and it’s true. Out of the top five commentators, while one has been here almost from the beginning, the other four have been commenting eighteen months or so.

So what is the rest of the story? I did write these posts, and they did reflect my mood this year, and I would like to talk about that more. So that will be part two.

~ by Servetus on January 1, 2016.