I was looking at the little “view last 100 visitors to this blog” thing that’s over in the meta section, and noticed that my page viewers (not sure that they’re reading anything) are pretty well spread out across the Northern Hemisphere. In fact, out of the last 100 visitors, 37 were from outside the U.S. That seems high to me but I can’t explain why (unless perhaps the recurring Apple/Mac themes I seem to get caught up in have a greater appeal, as Harry Shearer would say, “outside the bubble).”
When you consider that surely 10-20% of the US visits are from indexing bots, the outside-US percentage probably approaches 50%. Is this common to most other blogs? OK, I’m sure a NASCAR-related site won’t draw in many Stockholm readers but how about other less domestically-focused blogs? What’s the percentage of all internet users that reside outside the US? I’ve seen some older stats that said the balance shifted back in 2003—most internet users are now outside the US—but that’s not the entire story. Many of those users don’t read English and many, many more could care less about the stuff I post here. I guess I have some research to do before I decide whether having between a third to one half of my visitors coming from outside the US is actually worth commenting upon.