Last month, Kosmo Foto reached another milestone.
In November, the blog finally hit the one million page views mark, as it approached the end of its seventh year of publishing.
Not exactly a landslide, but considering it’s taken only two years to go from 500,000 to one million, this is all heartening growth. Writing a blog – coming up with story ideas, writing post you’re proud of, finding the images that help those stories come alive – is hard. And hey, I do this kind of stuff for a living.
Kosmo Foto is small fry compared to some of the other film photography blogs – it gets only a fraction of the traffic of sites like 35mmc, Casual Photophile and Japan Camera Hunter. But it has gone from strength to strength over the last few years. I think that it’s partly because there’s a wider range of stories on there – quick-turn news pieces for instance – and more writing and photography from other writers in guest reviews and Kosmonaut posts.
The only fly in the ointment has been the blog’s name change and the loss of a fair amount of carefully crafted backlinks. Annoying, but the posts themselves are still be there, and you’ll hopefully keep reading them.
But here’s the fun bit. I love a good stat, and the million-view mark means I can start delving deep into the site stats and finding out where you’re all from and what you’re reading.
Geography wise, here’s a few things I’ve pulled out.
- Some 26% of Kosmo Foto’s page views have come from the US, 19% from the UK and 5% from Germany. Half the views come from just these three countries.
- Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Singapore round out the Top 10.
- There’s more readers from Belgium than there are Brazil.
- As a proud New Zealander, I’m glad to report that a touch under 1% of the views – 8,545 – come from fellow Kiwis. NZ stats nerds, that’s about the population of Pakuranga.
- There’s more views from the United Arab Emirates than China.
- There’s almost twice as many views from Malta (Population: 475,000) than there are from Pakistan (Population: 212 million). Good people of Islamabad, Karachi and Rawalpindi, stop looking at Cricinfo for a minute and join us.
- More page views have come from the Isle of Man than Kenya.
- I get more views from individual Channel Islands (Hello Guernsey! Hello Jersey!) than I do most African countries.
- Seven states, territories or countries have looked at the blog just once: so here’s a hearty hello to the solitary reader from, respectively, the Marshall Islands, North Korea, Turkmenistan, South Sudan, St Pierre & Miquelon, Lesotho and Comoros. If you liked it, tell a friend!
Story wise, the biggest thing ever published on the blog was a long-read on the return of film from the beginning of 2017 – it’s been read than 42,000 times.
Next was this piece from 2014 listing five film cameras you could buy for less than £50.
Two camera reviews – the Nikon FM2 and the Praktica MTL 50 – are in the top five. Both rate pretty highly on Google, so it’s no surprise that their traffic trundles along nicely day after day.
The fifth-biggest piece is a round-up of films to shoot in 2016. Like the top two pieces, however, this piece really has seen its traffic fall since the blog went from Zorki Photo to Kosmo Foto.
So what do I have planned for 2019? Well, I do have a target – I’d like to get 500,000 page views in 2019, and you can help me by getting in touch and letting me know what you like on the site and want to see more of – and sharing it wide and far if you like it.
Readers from Bhutan (16 views), Zimbabwe (7 views), Aruba (6 views) and Equatorial Guinea (3 views) that includes you too.
- You can also help support the blog financially using the Ko-fi and Patreon buttons below, keeping it free to read forever more.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
Hearty congratulations on 1 MM! May you reach 2 MM in the next 12 months!
Thanks Jim, a million hits in one year would be fantastic!