Report Card: New Savanna and Academia.edu, end of 2024

Time to report on traffic here at the Savanna and over at Academia.edu. As of Jan. 1, 2025, this is the traffic at New Savanna over the past year.

Now look at all-time traffic:

Notice that big rise in 2017. I haven’t got the foggiest idea what happened there, but whatever it was, it didn’t last. Traffic was back down, though perhaps just a big higher than before that period. Then we got a big jump at the end of 2023 and that stayed with us through 2024. I don’t know what that’s about either, but it does seem to be dropping off. How far down it’ll go, I don’t know.

Here's the top posts over the last year:

The top two have been riding high for a long time. The second one, about Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll, is one of the oldest posts here, and it’s about sex, a surefire winner. The third post, Shakespeare on the wane? went up in October of last year. The reason it has so many hits is that Tyler Cowen mentioned it over at Marginal Revolution, which has a huge following. Similarly, GOAT Literary Critics went up on December 4, 2023. It also got a boost from Cowen. But the last one down, Claude 3.5 Sonnet visits Times Square, didn’t get a boost from Cowen. It sent up on December 9, 2024 and got over 600 hits on its own (the tallies in Blogger’s multiple-post listings tend to be lower than the tallies you get at the posts taken individually). I’m not sure why this one got so many hits, way more than any of the other “Claude describes” posts.

Now, to Academia.edu. At the beginning of the year I was, I believe, at the 99.5th percentile in total hits, however it is that Academia measures that (I believe it’s over the previous 30 days). I’d been as high as 99.9 sometime during 2023. It dropped to 99.0 during the middle of the year, but now I’m back up to 99.5.

Here's the traffic for the last 60 days. The green line is paper views and the black line is unique visitors. The blue line is for profile views.

This table is sorted by most all-time downloads in descending order (rightmost column). Notice the document with the most downloads is a paper with practical advice on how to play relatively simple polyrhythms on a tongue drum. An encyclopedia article on Visual Thinking is third.