Bazaar Numbers

Friday 20th January, is the second anniversary of the launch of The Story Bazaar web-site. We have been going for two whole years, so now is an appropriate time to take stock of another year’s activity.

There were one hundred and sixty-one articles posted on  the site across the year, approximately three a week, with twenty-two of them being by bloggers other than juliej. Our sailor blogger took a year off but promises to return, while our nomad roamed the globe, reporting back for Story Bazaar readers. Readers Club had three discrete new pieces of fiction, as well as an ‘e’ copy of the 2015 Compendium which contained more.

People who commented upon blog articles or tweeted about them included fellow writers and bloggers, gallery staff,  academics, a British Museum curator, Jerez Flamenco Festival goers and visitors to London.

Site visitor numbers have more than doubled this year and views per day/week/month have grown by over 50% across the last twelve months. In December 2016 alone there were over 600 visitors to the site ( and in both 2015 and 2916 December was the month with most visitors, though March 2016 saw a surge, of people visiting to read about the Flamenco festival ).  June was the month with the least visitors in 2016, as compared to August the year before.

As in 2015, the overwhelming number of visitors were from the UK, but there are a growing number from the US and other parts of Europe – Spain, Germany, France and Italy. India climbed up the list just over-taking fellow Commonwealth countries Canada and Australia. We also added Andorra and Myanmar to the list of countries which provided a visitor or two.

Folk arrive at the site mainly via search engines, but also via Twitter 1%, Facebook 21% and LinkedIn 5%.  It is estimated, by those who know about such things, that something like 70% of traffic to a web-site comes from random activity i.e. people who don’t already know about the site looking up a particular topic or seeing the site name somewhere and checking it out.

This doesn’t seem to be born out in the case of The Story Bazaar.  The statistics allow the calculation of likely returnee numbers and there are a healthy number of them. The Story Bazaar may not get the numbers that really popular web-sites get ( indeed big sites gets many thousands of visitors a day ) but people who like The Story Bazaar tend to come back to it.

The most popular articles this year were those within two series; on walking and breathing, by Barbara Pidgeon, and the politics series, by Julie Anderson, although certain posts from 2015 continued to be popular. The series about the Festival de Jerez 2016 came close behind, with a high number of ‘hits’ on the post entitled ‘Lamento‘. The articles about ‘Omnibus Edition’ the Clapham Literary Festival were also popular, presumably among folk who attended events therein.

The Story Bazaar will continue to post articles in 2017, from across the wider globe and from London and parts of Europe. I hope readers continue to enjoy reading them, and The Story Bazaar books and keep coming back for more.