Look at all the blog hits - that means I must be right!

Anthony Watts has made one of his rare appearances on his blog to report his blog stats for 2015 (archived here). They are impressive, although as he pointed out, slightly worse than last year. I doubt that his claim of being the #1 climate related blog in the world is true. There are other climate-related blogs like those of Jeff Masters and his colleagues at Weather Underground, Joe Romm at Think Progress, which I'd guess have a lot more visits than WUWT does. And if you judge #1 by quality rather than number of visitors, WUWT would rank well below zero on a scale of one to ten, way, way below quality climate blogs like realclimate.org and well below skepticalscience.com and any of the blogs listed in HotWhopper's blogroll.

Anthony reported that WUWT had almost 42,000,000 page hits last year. For comparison, for every pageview at HotWhopper, WUWT gets nearly 40 page hits. For comparison with Judith's blog (she has also reported her stats, archived here), for every visit to Judith's blog, WUWT gets almost ten page hits. (Visits are just under 10% of the page hits at WUWT. I think "visits" probably equates with Google Analytic's "users", which comprise slightly more than 10% of the page hits at HotWhopper. Google Analytics also lists "sessions", which comprise more than half the page views at HotWhopper.)

Another thing was that Anthony seems to have discovered a whole heap of new countries - or maybe WordPress regards some places as countries that nobody else does. Here is what he showed:

237 countries? Does that include various territories of nations, and maybe uninhabited islands? (I note that Anthony disregards Australia, which looks to have about the same number of visits as his UK and Canada.)

Comparing the white spaces on Anthony's map, it looks to me as if HotWhopper might get visits from more countries, for all its smaller audience. Google Analytics shows HotWhopper had visits from 196 countries since I started collecting stats from there, back in April 2013. And it shows visits from 172 different countries since 1 January 2015. That's mostly independent countries, but I see that the US Virgin Islands is listed separately, which is probably okay, given they don't have all the privileges of people living in USA proper.

Below is a map showing where HotWhopper's visitors come from:

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HotWhopper is still a new kid on the block compared to WUWT and to Judith Curry's blog, and there's plenty of room for improving its reach. I've got to say, though, that I regard the quality of readers of HotWhopper much more highly than those of WUWT and Judith's, judging by the comments left here and there.

Since I'm also comparing visits and visitors, I won't point the finger. However I wonder if Anthony and Judith suffer from "all these blog hits means I must be right" syndrome, as illustrated in this Gabby cartoon:

Judith lists her guest authors, who are mostly (not all) climate science deniers, pseudo-science quacks or climate contrarians. She must be proud of them.

There are many, many more websites with information about climate science, global warming and climate change than there are websites for climate science denial. They range from general climate websites to specialist websites run by experts in particular fields. Being a big fish in a small pond is not so hard. But how would you define the pond? WUWT isn't a climate blog, it's a conspiracy blog that specialises in stories about the supposed grand climate hoax, replete with claims that scientists are all engaged in fraud and other nefarious activities, and that we're really heading for an ice age.

I wonder how Anthony's blog stats compare to other popular conspiracy websites.  Beating Above Top Secret and Infowars for page hits is the real target Anthony should be aiming for (and it could well be his target, though he would have a long way to go).