Big Dave’s Stats for March 2-8, 2026
One of our regular visitors recently inquired about the number of hits on the site and I thought it would be interesting to delve into this a bit. While there is a Statistics page on this site (under the About tab), it has not been updated since 2021.
Here are the stats from last week (March 2-8, 2026):
Understanding Views and Visitors
There were 34,500 visitors to the site and 89,000 views. A view refers to when a visitor loads or reloads a page. A visitor refers to when a user or browser is seen for the first time in the selected time frame. A visitor is an individual looking at the site. A visitor can view the site’s different pages or the same page multiple times. Therefore, one can expect views to be higher than visitors.
Most Viewed Posts and Pages
Not surprisingly, the most viewed page is the Homepage which serves as the “front lobby” to the site through which most visitors likely enter before proceeding to their post or page of interest. The number of views typically increases from Monday to Saturday, correlating with the increasing difficulty level of the puzzle, reaching its peak for the Saturday Prize Puzzle. (I have no idea why ST 3359 is highlighted. It is not intentional and, in spite of all my efforts, I could not remove it.)
Location of Visitors
The vast majority of visitors are from the UK although there are significant numbers from around the world. However, in terms of participation in the discussion in the Comments section of the blog, those of us from outside the UK are clearly punching above our weight.
Most Viewed Authors
As one would expect, the most viewed authors correspond to the most viewed posts. It is interesting to to see that Big Dave is still among the 10 most viewed authors with visitors last week accessing 100 pages that he authored. Of the viewed pages authored by Big Dave, the single most popular page was “US States – Abbreviations, Capitals and Nicknames” with the majority being reviews of puzzles published long ago — which perhaps indicates there are a lot of people solving puzzles from compendiums of past puzzles and then reading the reviews for those puzzles.
All Time High
Impressive as these numbers are, they are a far cry from readership in the past. The blog probably reached its highest point in 2018 when monthly views peaked at 622,922* in October although the highest daily average of 20,173 was reached in November (October beat out November overall due to its extra day).
* This figure is higher than the number shown on the blog’s stats page as some pages would have been viewed since the figures on the Stats page were compiled in 2021.
The highest weekly views may have been the week of October 29, 2018 to November 4, 2018.
The number of visitors hasn’t dropped off quite as much as the number of views. In 2018, each visitor accounted for 3.1 views whereas today each visitor accounts for only 2.6 views.
One thing that has increased is today’s visitor’s are chattier. In 2018, about 9 visitors per thousand left a comment. Today, the rate is about 15 comments per 1000 visitors.