4,000,000 hits

4,000,000 Pageviews (21/7/2026)

This is beginning to get a bit weird. As I said in my previous post on the subject:

It took me 12 years to reach the first million hits on this blog. After that, it took another five years to get to two million. It's taken a bit under a year and a half to clock up a third million.

And now, a bit over seven months later, another million hits.

Where do they all come from? Is the material here really that interesting, to so many people? The fact that I've just celebrated the twentieth anniversary of The Imaginary Museum might have something to do with it, I suppose.

Blogs don't usually stay active for that long. People get tired of them, or shift to other forms of social media - or, for that matter, their authors run out of material.

I have two theories at present:

1. that this increase in traffic is driven mainly by image searches - even though I'm careful to attribute the source of every picture I use, I suspect that a lot of those links will have gone dead by now, leaving this as the principal citable source.
   
2. that huge AI machines are sucking out slabs of my prose on a daily basis. I could make the text uncopiable, I suppose - there's a function for that - but I'm reluctant to do so. I'd rather the material here was freely available for anyone who wants to quote from it.

Anyway, whatever the explanation, it's heartening to see those numbers go up day by day. I'd like it if people still commented on the posts as much as they used to do, but you can't have everything. All I can say is that I'm grateful to my readers for encouraging this choice of activity. It's by far the most pleasant form of occasional writing I've ever done: beats reviewing - let alone refereed Academic essays - by a mile.

Anyway, here they are again: four sets of statistics from 2018, 2024, 2025 and now 2026:

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4,000,000 Pageviews (19/12/25-21/7/2026)
[7 months, 2 days]

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3,000,010 Pageviews (5/8/24-19/12/2025)
[1 year, 4 1/2 months]

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2,000,110 Pageviews (6/12/18-5/8/2024)
[5 years, 8 months]

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1,000,000 Pageviews (14/6/06-6/12/2018)
[12 years, 6 months]

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There are some other interesting features to observe. For instance, note the recent increase in traffic recorded on this graph:

Pageviews graph (21/7/2026)

What is it that happened around the beginning of 2025 to justify this exponential increase? The top locations for traffic seem to have stayed much the same - though the United States is more dominant than in earlier surveys. Perhaps the mere fact of maintaining a blog has become more of an interesting novelty.

Top Locations of Pageviews (21/7/2026)

No, what really interests me about these blog statistics is the large grey area among the "top referrers" of pageviews. Google search engines would, I would have thought, accounted for most of the traffic to this blog: but it seems not. The majority of the referrals are coming from - somewhere else; somewhere in the unknown reaches of the internet, somewhere in the grey ...

Top Referrers of Pageviews (21/7/2026)

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