It’s hard to overstate just how huge February was for us here at Southern Fried Science. When we did our soft relaunch this January, we expected visitor numbers to be flat for quite a while. No one wants to read blogs anymore, right? Short form videos and the infinite feed are king.
I am very happy to report that we were wrong.
Over 50,000 people visited Southern Fried Science in February, 2024. For comparison, a little more than 100,000 people visited the site in all of 2023 (to be fair, we publish 19 articles, total, in 2023). You read about pregnant stingrays, got some pointers on how to use Bluesky, learned about right whales, and revisited some perennial favorites like this article about the sulfur pyramids of Alberta from 2012. February averaged 1800 visitors per day. The last time we saw those numbers was in 2017.
I’m not arguing that there’s something exceptional about Southern Fried Science (there is, but that’s besides the point). I’m arguing that the people hunger for blogs. People want to read articles written by real humans that care about the topics and ideas they write about. The apps are lying to us, you’re all glorious ocean nerds.
Here are the top ten Southern Fried Science articles from this month:
- No, a shark did not get a stingray pregnant. But what really happened is pretty cool!
- Bluesky is now open. Science Twitter, here’s how to use it!
- A quick and dirty guide to making custom feeds on Bluesky
- Here’s how thresher sharks whip their tails back and forth
- Roll for Climate Initiative: A Dungeon Master’s Guide to Running for Local Public Office
- Alberta, Canada is the proud owner of the largest man-made pyramid on the planet
- NOAA confirms North Atlantic Right Whale killed by commercial lobster gear
- Of all the things that haven’t happened, these are the things that haven’t happened in the Ocean so far this year
- “If that’s so important to shark conservation, why have I never heard of it?”
- Cherry, Maple, and Walnut: My 2023 woodworking year in review.
Oceanography’s Diversity Deficit is the most important article we published this month, but as it just came out two days ago, it hasn’t quite caught up to the raw numbers of our latest piece in the long-running series David Complains About Shark News. You can fix that right now.
The search engines were responsible for about half our traffic, with Facebook, Twitter, and Bluesky covering the bulk of the remainder. LinkedIn, Reddit, and Pinterest drove a few hundred clicks each. We’re also seeing an upswing in inbound links from Canvas and Instructure, which tells me that teachers are including some of our articles in their classes. We also got one weird incoming link from ChatGPT, which makes me thing the plagiarism pattern-seeking apps are hallucinating blog posts.
We’re well on track to blow past our total 2023 traffic by the end of the first quarter of 2024. I can’t think of any better evidence that blogs are coming back.
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