Whilst 2019 is officially here, I’m still looking back at 2018. Here at Toy Photographers we love to do some analysis on our photos, so as part of that this year, I thought I would take a look back at the blog as a whole for 2018. The following is what I discovered. 

Top five blog posts

Kinder toy in an egg box

Kinder toy in an egg box

It’s always interesting taking a look at what your top performing pages are on a website. The top page on our site is the home page, no surprises there. But looking at the top five blog posts from the year is a different story – it’s very surprising in fact!

  1. The toys of Kinder Surprise (1,399 page views)
  2. Ship in a bottle (1,337 page views)
  3. Spider holster review and giveaway (1,145 page views)
  4. Another series 18 contest (972 page views)
  5. Series 18 Collectible Minifigures Review (892 page views)

I’m not quite sure why the Kinder Surprise post is top, but it seems to have gone down ‘surprisingly’ well. Shelly’s post about the LEGO Ship in the Bottle set came in a close second. With some absolutely stunning photographs in there, why not take a second look at that post! Third and fourth place goes to contest posts, so obviously you guys like those! In fifth place is Brett’s look at the wonderful LEGO Series 18 minifigures. And oh look, another contest in there!

Types of post

Over the year we had a total of 349 posts! That’s one pretty much everyday! Of course, posting this much means we had several themes become apparent across the year. During 2018 we had:

We’re looking to continue bringing you Six Image Narratives, and to increase the amount of tutorials and tips and tricks in 2019, so it will be interesting to see how this all changes next year!

Types of toys

Kitten rescue.

For this data I was reliant on authors having added appropriate tags to their posts. This isn’t always done, but from what I could work out, here’s the breakdown of toys for 2018:

We are all still sharing a lot of LEGO from the looks of this list! It’s not a surprise, as we do love those little minifigures and bricks! However variety is the spice of life and I am going to be looking to branch out of my LEGO zone this year. I do have a wide variety of other toys to play with so it’s looking hopeful! Those Porgs I got for Christmas are already hounding me for more photos! And of course, we all hope to see more of Brett’s new 1:6 scale SigFig!

Author counts

We started the year out with four main members of the editorial team: Shelly, Brett, James and myself. By the end of the year, we also had Dave regularly contributing to the blog with his wonderful sense of humour! Our post counts for the year look something like this:

Chart showing top five authors for 2018

Most prolific author award goes to…

In 2019 James, Shelly, Brett and myself will be publishing a little less, and we will have some new voices for you to hear! I can’t wait to see what the blog looks like next year with all the new input!

Key stats

Moving away from the content of the blog, I took a look at our Google Analytics for the year (OK, well up to December 27th, when I wrote this!) We had a brilliant year and it was on the up in terms of usage, across the board!

  • 27,418 users  (up 32% on 2017)
  • 108, 229 page views (up 55% on 2017)
  • 53,473 sessions (up 31% on 2017)

Devices used

The majority of our readers check out the blog on a mobile device, although there is still a significant proportion of you reading on a desktop!

Pie chart showing device breakdown for blog readership

Mobile users to the front!

Where our readers are from

Our final bit of interesting analytics is all about where our readers are. We pretty much knew that America would take the top spot, but the range of other countries is really good! We really are a worldwide blog! Is your country on the list?

Pie chart showing where our readers are from

Play spot the country with out top ten reader locations!

I hope that didn’t bore you too much! And indeed, I hope it interested you, particularly if you are a bit of a data nerd like me! I’ll be back in a fortnight with a new post, all about the project I’ve decided to do this year! Stay tuned!

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