Opus in Numbers (2024 Edition)

2024 might’ve been Opus’ busiest year in maybe ever with 463 posts. That’s an average of 38.6 posts/month, or 1.27 posts/day. (2022 technically had more posts, but many of them were imported from other sites as I consolidated my writing archives.)

All of that posting correlated with increased traffic. 2024’s busiest month was November, with 16,909 pageviews, followed by October (15,275 pageviews). Compare that to 2023’s busiest month, also November, which had 14,619 pageviews. As for 2024’s slowest month, that was February with a mere 7,587 pageviews.

A quick note re. the site’s analytics: 2024 was my first full year using Tinylytics. (I dropped Google Analytics after 2023.) I really like Tinylytics, but it’s considerably more slimmed down than Google Analytics, so I can’t necessarily dig as deep into the site’s trends as I could before — which is OK. (Less obsessing over numbers is a good thing.)

That said, these were the most popular posts that I published in 2024:

• The Cure’s Albums, Ranked
• How Native Mixins Could Make Your CSS More Efficient
• Bluesky Now Supports Hashtags
• 88 Films Announces 4K Reissue of Jet Li’s Fist of Legend
• Highlighting Selected Table Rows with CSS and the :has() Selector

These were the most popular “Cultural Diet” entries that I published in 2024:

• A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman and Rafael Albuquerque
• Dune: Part One by Denis Villeneuve
• Hellboy: The Complete Series by Mike Mignola
• The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Guy Ritchie
• Road House by Rowdy Herrington

If you’ll recall, the Cultural Diet is where I post quick reviews, complete with ratings, of all of the movies, TV shows, books, comics, etc., that I experience. In all, I posted 204 reviews to the Diet. Of those, these got five stars:

• Curepedia: An A-Z of the Cure by Simon Price
• Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa
• Fist of Legend by Gordon Chan
• Big Trouble in Little China by John Carpenter

Finally, these were Opus’ most popular posts in 2024 regardless of when they were published:

• Fixing the iOS Toolbar Overlap Issue with CSS Viewport Units (2023)
• Exploring the Strange, Ultra-Futuristic World of Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame! (2018)
• My Neighbor Totoro Is About a Young Girl Who Was Murdered (2012)
• The Fall by Tarsem Singh (Review) (2022)
• Macross 101: An Intro to the Legendary Anime Franchise (2022)

As with previous years, most of Opus’ traffic came from the United States, at 42%, followed by Great Britain (6.4%), Canada (4.64%), Germany (2.8%), and Australia (2.5%). I had exactly one visitor from several countries in 2024, including Afghanistan, American Samoa, Djibouti, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Tech-wise, Chrome dominated the site’s browser traffic, at 57%, followed by Safari (24.1%), Firefox (8.9%), Microsoft Edge (3.5%), and Opera (1.8%). As a browser nerd, I’m always interested in seeing which obscure browsers are used to view Opus. 2024 saw visits from Android’s Huawei and Miui browsers as well as a single visit from an Internet Explorer user.

Interestingly, Windows was the primary platform used to view Opus in 2024, at 30%, followed by iOS for iPhone (23.2%), Android (23%), macOS (18.1%), and Generic Linux (4.5%). I also had a single visit from a KaiOS user.

Turning to social media, these posts received the most activity (e.g., views, reactions, comments) on Facebook in 2024:

• “The Show” by The Rope
• 81:03 by Antarctica (Review)
• Lincoln’s Lonely Winters
• “Deux” by Blueboy
• “Can You Feel the Wind?” by Bell Monks

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get 2024 analytics from the other major social media platforms.

• X/Twitter now requires you to be an “X Premium” member to view account analytics. But since I have no intention of ever giving Elon Musk a single penny, that’s a moot point.
• Bluesky doesn’t have native analytics, so you must sign up for a third-party monitoring service like Bsky Hub (which I hadn’t done in time for 2024).
• Threads only lets you view up to 90 days’ worth of analytics, making year-end assessments impossible.

I try not to depend on analytics to determine what I write about. I write about whatever I want to write about, which results in some eclectic and wide-ranging coverage — and I think people appreciate that, especially as AI-generated slop becomes increasingly ubiquitous. Something I originally tweeted back in 2022 has become something of a personal manifesto:

I’m not sure who I’m writing for when I write about anime magazines from the ’00s, ’80s Christian goth/industrial bands, or obscure samurai films from the ’60s. Maybe it’s just me. But those things are cool and shouldn’t vanish into obscurity without somebody marking their existence.

As 2024 revealed, though, plenty of other people are interested in those topics, too, and it’s deeply gratifying to see that more and more of you sate your curiosity by visiting Opus. The site’s 30th(!) anniversary is just a couple of years away, and I hope you’ll continue reading the site, and maybe even discover some new favorite pop culture artifact in the meantime.