In 2016 and 2018, I (Briana) conducted a blogger stats survey to help shed some transparency on what stats are “normal” in book blogging. I personally found it helpful because many people seemed to assume that their own stats were significantly lower than other bloggers’, when that often was not the case. It’s been two years since the last survey, so I thought it would be interesting to get some updated results for 2020, particularly as focus in the book community so often seems to be on Booktube, Bookstagram, and now BookTok.
Participation is anonymous, so please participate if this is a project that interests you. Also feel free to share, as the stats will be better if there are more data points (in 2016, I received about 70 responses; in 2018, I received 107). The 2016 survey results are here. The 2018 survey results are here.
I’ve kept the questions about stats the same as in 2018, in order to compare across years, but I eliminated the questions about predicting the stats of other blogs. With two surveys already done, I imagine people would just look at the past results to guess, which wouldn’t result in any interesting data.
* Note that by “blogger,” I mean someone who runs a blog, not someone running a Booktube channel, Bookstagram. (You can do both, but you should have an actual blog.)
If you can’t see the survey embedded below, you can fill it out by clicking here.
Thanks for doing this! I’m eager to see results!
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Me too!
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I used to run a couple different sites back when Extreme Couponing was all the rage. I saw a lot of badly written blogs that had high numbers of followers. How many of those followers actually read the blogs is another matter. I had a large email list of 4,000 followers (culled from doing giveaways) and it was a hyper-local site, but I had healthy numbers (800-1000 views a day) and average engagement (looking back, at the time I thought I could have done better). Now I’m content to grow my blog more organically, NOT rely on Facebook, which so many other blogs did and it came back to bite them in the butt, and just try to have fun doing it. I think, in four months, I’ve done rather well, and hope to continue to do so. I’m very curious to see your results!
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That is one of the problem with stats! I think probably the most “accurate” stat is page views because it’s true you can have 10,000 followers, but maybe half of them aren’t actually looking at your blog! We’ve been blogging nine years, for instance, so some of the people in our follower count are definitely people who were reading our blog 7 years ago but haven’t looked at a book blog since.
I also like number of comments as a stat to see how engaged people are, but of course with book blogs, comments tend to come from other bloggers, whereas many people might be reading the blog and enjoying it but simply not commenting.
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I’m curious and interested to see what the results of the survey are.
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I’m also curious to see if this year’s results will be much different from past years. I know I have been blogging a lot more and therefore have increased stats because I’ve been laid off most of the year due to the pandemic… although not enough of an increase to bump me from the lowest categories 😂
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My stats are up a bit since March, so I think people are just online more, and it’s not anything I did….
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This is a fun idea! I really enjoyed seeing the past results and I’m eager to see what this year is like.
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Your comment was marked as spam, and I have to save you from the spam folder!
I’m glad you enjoy the idea. I’m hoping the results will be interesting, too!
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Oh yeay I just filled it in.
WordPress.com hasn’t counted my twitter and bookstagram followers in a long time. Before I could see it alongside my blog followers but I haven’t been able to see that in a while, hmm.
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Thanks!
Interesting! If I go to insights, it tells me I have 4700 WordPress followers, 85 email, and a little over 1000 social, so it breaks it down that way. But if I look at the follower count i our sidebar, it just says around 6000, so it’s counting the social ones.
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Oh thats weird because my sidebard count doesn’t even add the email followers haha.
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That’s so strange! I would have assumed it worked the same way for everyone. I didn’t think it varied by theme or anything because it’s a widget, but maybe it does?
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Bit late in getting to this sorry. Hope it’s not too late to add into your stats.
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Not late at all! Thanks!
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