Techdirt 2022: The Stats

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:

1. Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve
2. It Took Just Four Days From Elon Gleefully Admitting He'd Unplugged A Server Rack For Twitter To Have A Major Outage
3. Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Twitter And Hunter Biden's Laptop
4. Subreddit Discriminates Against Anyone Who Doesn't Call Texas Governor Greg Abbott A Little Piss Baby' To Highlight Absurdity Of Content Moderation Law
5. North Carolina Republicans Push Bill Forcing Towns To Destroy Electric Car Chargers
6. Does Twitter Have Any Employees Left Who Remember That The Company Is Under A Strict Consent Decree With The FTC?
7. Kids Use Discord Chat To Track Predator Teacher's Actions; Under California's Kids Code, They'd Be Blocked
8. Ridiculous: Gov't Contractor Copies Open Source 3D Printing Concept... And Patents It
9. It's Still Stupidly, Ridiculously Difficult To Buy A Dumb' TV
10. Ye's Buyout' Of Parler Looks Very Much Like A Failed Company Taking Advantage Of Troubled Rich Guy

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:

1. No One Has Any Clue How Texas' Social Media Law Can Actually Work (Because It Can't Work) (790 Comments)
2. 5th Circuit Rewrites A Century Of 1st Amendment Law To Argue Internet Companies Have No Right To Moderate (625 Comments)
3. Stop Trying To Make State Action Doctrine Happen (467 Comments)
4. This Is Really, Really Dumb: Ohio Court Says Google May Be A Common Carrier (461 Comments)
5. The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law (452 Comments)
6. Twitter's Legal Team Has Been An Aggressive Defender Of Free Speech; Will That Continue Under Musk? (420 Comments - Musk would find this funny)
7. No, The FBI Is NOT Paying Twitter To Censor' (409 Comments)
8. If You Think Free Speech Is Defined By Your Ability To Be An Asshole Without Consequence, You Don't Understand Free Speech (But You Remain An Asshole) (393 Comments)
9. Danish Court Confirms Insane Little Mermaid' Copyright Ruling Against Newspaper Over Cartoon (387 Comments)
10. Musk, Twitter, Why The First Amendment Can't Resolve Content Moderation (Part I) (351 Comments)

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:

1. Stephen T. Stone 3943 comments
2. That One Guy 2055 comments
3. LostInLoDOS 1985 comments
4. Toom1275 1923 comments
5. PaulT 1720 comments
6. That Anonymous Coward 1555 comments
7. Chozen 1385 comments
8. bhull242 1198 comments
9. Samuel Abram 951 comments
10. terop 914 comments

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

1. Stephen T. Stone 668 comments (17%)
2. That One Guy 584 comments (28%)
3. PaulT 309 comments (18%)
4. That Anonymous Coward 180 comments (12%)
5. Toom1275 176 comments (9%)
6. Mike Masnick 147 comments (29%)
7. Thad 85 comments (21%)
8. James Burkhardt 70 comments (24%)
9. nasch 68 comments (8%)
10. Samuel Abram 67 comments (7%)

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

1. That One Guy 87 comments (4.2%)
2. Stephen T. Stone 86 comments (2.2%)
3. Thad 40 comments (9.8%)
4. That Anonymous Coward 39 comments (2.5%)
5. Toom1275 36 comments (1.9%)
6. Cat_Daddy 26 comments (13.3%)
7. Samuel Abram 13 comments (1.4%)
8. PaulT 12 comments (0.7%)
9. Flakbait 11 comments (25.6%)
10. nasch 8 comments (1.0%)

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...