31 December 2020

By Göran R Buckhorn

At the end of the terrible year 2020, HTBS editor Göran R Buckhorn has been busy counting numbers.

Finally, it’s time to wrap up this horrendous, COVID-19-ridden year. However, this being said, it was a ‘good’ year for HTBS. Never have so many readers come to read and check out the website since we started it in 2009. It might interest you to see some behind-the-scenes stats… (All numbers are counted until 10:30 p.m. on 30 December.)

During 2020, HTBS has published 339 posts (including this article). We have had 215,414 so-called page views (reads) from 88,000 visitors this year.

The most read article during 2020 was “The Oarsmen of L. C. Leyendecker: Homeric or Homoerotic” (14 March 2017), which has had 2,545 views. In second place is “The Rowing Memsahibs of Naini Tal” (5 June 2020), 2,412 views, and in third place is “A Flapper Goes Rowing” (23 March 2016) with 2,043 views.

It might seem surprising that two of the three most read articles of the year are from 2017 and 2016. Here outside forces are to blame or thank. Images from both the ‘Leyendecker’ and ‘Flapper’ articles have been posted on Pinterest by someones not connected to HTBS, and these someones have been kind enough to link to the HTBS articles. It seems, not surprisingly, men’s semi-nude bodies and women’s legs still sell!

The ‘Memsahibs’ article was picked up by someone (rower or not?) in India who linked to the article soon after being published in June, and suddenly it skyrocketed on HTBS.

Which countries did the readers come from in 2020? Here is a list of the top ten countries with page views:

United Kingdom 93,049
USA 58,031
Australia 11,338
Germany 7,357
Ireland 5,351
The Netherlands 5,014
Canada 4,166
France 3,641
India 2,780
Sweden 2,491

Today’s post is the 3,686th post since we started in 2009, and since the start we have a total of 2,403,656 views!

Thank you, dear readers, for choosing HTBS for your daily read.

See you next year on HTBS!