One of the more entertaining features of Site Counter is that you can provide yourself with a snapshot of where a particular blogs readers live by examining the Visitor Time Zone Share map.
At present (10.20 p.m. on Friday evening) most of our readers (46%) appear to live in the Greenwich Mean Time zone. I suppose that’s not surprising as most of our output is concerned with British politics.
More surprising is the fact that the USA and Canada supply a large proportion of readers. Nearly 42% in total. 22% of you reside in the Eastern zone which goes through New York, Washington DC etc. California gives us 8%, and the middle zones supply us with a further 12%.
We get 6% of readers from Central Europe (France, Germany etc) and 1% from Eastern Europe.
The rest of the world is divided between West Africa (3%), Brazil (1%) and a couple of other places which supply less than 1% (Alaska !)
The picture does change throughout the day though. I looked at the map earlier today and there were a small but significant number of readers in the Middle East, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. These have mostly vanished now though there are some early risers in New Zealand who appear to make up nearly 1% of our readership as I write.
I don’t know how accurate these statistics are or the frequency they are changed but they do seem to demonstrate that the majority of our readers tend to live in the Anglosphere. The only significant readership we seem to have in non-English speaking countries are Western Europe (too difficult to seperate which countries), Eastern Europe and Brazil though each of them pales in significance compared to the English speaking countries
I’ll have a look at this again in the morning when North America is in bed and report back on how this affects the picture. I suspect we’ll see some readers in India and a greater share for Hong Kong/Australasia though I’ve no idea how many readers we have out East.
I’d be interested in hearing from any readers who live in places which might not show up on the statistics.
Siberia, are you receiving us ?
Update It would appear that the stats get updated fairly frequently. Nearly 4% of current Harry’s Place readers are now in New Zealand where it is midday as opposed to midnight as it is here.
Further Update It’s 7.00 a.m. GMT and as I suspected the East of the world makes up a larger proportion of the Harry’s Place readership. New Zealand continues to be approximately 4%, Hong Kong is now 5%, Japan is 3% but no-one in Australia seems to be reading. Whether this is because it’s a Saturday I don’t know, though I do know that Saturday is a normal work day in lots of Hong Kong companies, unlike Australia. No-one seems to be reading in India though. Nor is anyone in the Middle East.
More surprisingly are the figures for North America which now makes up 56% of the readership. I thought America would be asleep and there would be a corresponding drop in the proportion of Americans reading rather than an increase. I wonder if this situation can be explained by the fact that 7.00 GMT is a very quiet time for this blog because of the way the Anglosphere timezones are configured and that a smallish number of insomniacs in the USA can skew the figures.
