Opus in Numbers (2025 Edition)
I previously remarked that 2024 might’ve been Opus’s busiest year ever with 463 total posts. But I blew past that figure in 2025, with 508 total posts on the site, which works out to 42.3 posts/month or 1.4 posts/day. Throughout the year, I set out to average one post/day, including Cultural Diet entries — a goal that I handily attained. (If I maintain a similar rate moving forward, then Opus should hit 9,000 posts midway through 2027.)
All of that posting activity, along with some posts that went semi-viral, also led to a dramatic leap in the site’s traffic. December was the site’s busiest month of all time, with 41,282 page views, followed by November with 35,714 page views. Compare that to 2024’s busiest month, November, which had 16,909 page views. Essentially, the site’s traffic more than doubled since 2024 — which is frankly mind-blowing and more than just a wee bit humbling.
Looking at the site’s content, these were the most popular posts that I published on Opus in 2025:
How to Remove AI From Your Google Chrome Experience 25 of the Best Titles Now Streaming on Howdy The Sad Irony of Hearing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” in Trump’s Parade Why did the Department of Defense delete a Medal of Honor recipient from its website? What will Netflix own after buying Warner Bros?
These were the most popular Cultural Diet entries that I published in 2025:
The Night Agent, Season Two (2025) The Residence (2025) The Wild Robot by Chris Sanders (2024) Counterattack by Chava Cartas (2025) Mage and the Endless Unknown by SJ Miller (2023)
In all, I posted 200 reviews to the Diet in 2025. Of those 200 movies, TV series, books, etc., these were the highest rated:
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by Peter Jackson (2001) Joslyn Art Museum Stranger Things, Season One (2016) Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru (2020) Ran by Akira Kurosawa (1985)
Finally, these were the most popular Opus posts in 2025 regardless of when they were published:
How to Remove AI From Your Google Chrome Experience Fixing the iOS Toolbar Overlap Issue with CSS Viewport Units Exploring the Strange, Ultra-Futuristic World of Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame! My Neighbor Totoro Is About a Young Girl Who Was Murdered The Fall by Tarsem Singh (Review)
Not surprisingly, most of Opus’s traffic (44.4%) came from the USA. What was surprising, however, was that Singapore took the #2 spot with 9.9% followed by the UK (6.6%), China (4.8%), and Canada (4.1%). I don’t think Singapore has ever been a significant source of traffic for Opus in all of the years that I’ve been tracking this stuff, and I’m curious as to why that changed in 2025. Additionally, I had exactly one visitor from thirteen different countries in 2025, including Djibouti, Greenland, Turks and Caicos, and most interestingly, the Holy See in the Vatican.
Tech-wise, Chrome dominated the site’s browser traffic, at 61.3%, followed by Safari (21.5%), Firefox (8.3%), Microsoft Edge (3%), and the Google Search App (1.7%). As a browser nerd, I’m always interested in seeing which obscure browsers are used to view Opus. 2025 saw visits from Android’s Mi Browser as well as a couple of Chinese browsers (QQ and Sogou).
As in 2024, Windows was the primary platform used to view Opus in 2025, at 38.2%, followed by iOS for iPhone (21.5%), Android (19.6%), macOS (15.9%), and Generic Linux (3.1%). Finally, I had a single visit from a Firefox OS user.
Turning to social media, these 2025 posts received the most activity (e.g., views, reactions, comments) on Facebook:
“Eyes Open” by The Mary Onettes and Maja Milner Lost in Ohio Is Reissuing Aunt Bettys’ 1996 Debut Album “The Silence” by Handful of Snowdrops “Monty Donahue” by Unwed Sailor “Endless Lullaby” by Redder Moon
Meanwhile, these were the most popular posts on Bluesky in 2025:
Keep Simplifying Web Development with Modern HTML “Trick of the Light” by Aarktica Turnstile Takes Over NPR’s Tiny Desk “A Distant Destination” by Strategy The CSS “light-dark” Function Simplifies Website Dark Modes
Bluesky doesn’t offer native analytics, so I used a third-party tool called Blueview to dig into my Bluesky activity. As for Threads, it only lets you view up to 90 days’ worth of analytics, preventing year-end assessments. And of course, I’m no longer active on X/Twitter.
By and large, Google was the site’s primary source of traffic, accounting for 49.1% of 2025’s page views. The second largest referrer was another search engine, DuckDuckGo, which accounted for 2.4% of page views. (Yes, you read that figure correctly, which just goes to show Google’s continued dominance, even after all these years.)
As far as social media-driven traffic goes, the vast majority of that came from Bluesky, which drove more than 5x the traffic to the site compared to Facebook. (Which is not surprising given that Bluesky doesn’t throttle or penalize link posts.) That said, social media-driven traffic as a whole was minuscule compared to search engine-driven traffic.
All in all, 2025 far exceeded any expectations that I had for Opus at the start of the year, both in terms of my own personal productivity as well as the site’s activity. Given the sheer amount of stuff that’s posted online these days, I’m continually heartened that more and more people find and read my writing even after nearly 30(!) years.
For my part, I promise to stick to the same approach I’ve taken with Opus since day one: writing honestly and passionately about the good, beautiful, and noteworthy in pop culture, wherever it might be found. If that appeals to you, then I hope you’ll consider becoming a subscriber and supporting my efforts.