2015: A Year in Review

I am not one of those good bloggers, those by-the-book bloggers. The good ones always know exactly who reads their articles, how many visitors they get each day, how people found their way to the articles, and on and on. But I have never paid much attention to such metrics. However, once or twice a year I put a bit of effort into generating some reports and thought I would share a bit of what happened here in 2015. Here is a brief recap of the year that was.

The site served up nearly 16,000,000 pageviews this year from somewhere around 7,500,000 people. These people visited from 237 different countries with 79% of them representing the United States. The top 5 countries were the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. Following those nations were Philippines, India, Singapore, New Zealand, and Kenya. Facebook was the largest source of visitors, followed by Google and Twitter. Visitors clicked a little over 12,000,000 links to visit articles listed in A La Carte. Beyond all of that, the site generated around 6,500,000 emails to the people who choose to receive the articles that way.

The top search terms that led people here were various spellings and misspellings of my name followed by “benny hinn,” “norman vincent peale,” “td jakes,” and “paul washer.” One of those is not like the others!

And here are the top-ten articles of the year in order of the number of views.

1. Why My Family Doesn’t Do Sleepovers. This marks the second year running that this article has been at the top of the list. This year alone it was read almost 5,000,000 times.
2. My Wife’s Plea to Christian Men. This one attracted a lot of attention, and a strange mix of both criticism and praise. For what it’s worth, she and I stand by it.
3. 10 Serious Problems with Jesus Calling. Here I outlined a series of significant concerns with a runaway bestselling book.
4. How an Affair Really Begins. I drew largely from the work of other people to show that affairs do not begin with sex.
5. 6 Reasons Why Sexual Predators Target Churches. I wrote this one early in the year after reading Deepak Reju’s book on protecting churches from predators.
6. A Clean House and a Wasted Life. This was a reflection on productivity and why we sometimes measure it all wrong.
7. You Don’t Need a Date Night. I wrote this one just a couple of weeks ago and it gained a surprising amount of attention.
8. 7 Lessons from 50 Shades of Grey. Just like the title says, I was reflecting on the 50 Shades phenomenon.
9. Joel Osteen or Fortune Cookie? This article from 5 years ago gained new life when I changed up the quiz format to make it interactive.
10. 5 Ways to Ruin a Perfectly Good Dating Relationship. A brief look at some ways that dating can go off the rails.

And that was 2015! I look forward to finishing out this year and then seeing what the next year will bring. Before I sign off for the day, please accept my gratitude that you continue to read this site. Your participation simply by reading the articles is a tremendous blessing and encouragement to me.