2024 was IrishCycle.com’s busiest year; Happy New Year to all readers

2024 was IrishCycle.com’s busiest year, with just short of 1.4 million views and 862,000 visitors (up from 1.1 million views and 750,000 visitors in 2023), with 457 articles published with a total of around 324k works (up from 310K words in 2023).

The year ended with 416 paying subscribers, up from 354 at the same time last year. IrishCycle does not carry any advertising, so subscribers are the lifeblood of this website’s journalism. More subscribers are needed to make this website viable into the future, so, if you have not already, please consider subscribing today.

Notably, there was a decrease per month within 2024 after April, when there was a change in cookies, and WordPress warned that the stats would be affected by this (see images below for more data). Readers can easily reject cookies and still read the site (or read it without making a choice and without accepting tracking). So, it is likely that the 2024 figures are a significant underestimation of the total figures.

Articles are also sent in full to email subscribers — these emails are opened on average 337 based on the last month of articles. As they have access to the full articles by email, a minority of these email subscribers (typically under 50 per article) directly click on the link and are counted by the website stats.

There were slightly fewer ‘posts’ (including articles and reader updates etc) published in 2024 compared to 2023 (within the backend WordPress systems, two different sources slightly differ by how much (485 vs 467 or 481 vs 457 articles).

The average word per article count was up 66 words year-on-year, from 644 words to 710. This suggests the decline relates to shorter articles or updates such as appeals for more readers to become subscribers.

Number of visitors per month

Even if we set aside the cookies, meaning the system records fewer hits after April, the wider picture of hits and visitors per month shows that there are also fluctuations by month over the years:

All-time annual insights

Views per month:

Average views per day:

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