Being an Engineer, I like statistics and numbers. So I thought I’d share some of the statistics from Wheat & Tares for 2022.
The W&T blog had a total of 242,600 unique visitors for the year. Those visitors made a total of 1.14 million views. By using the IP address of the computer used to view Wheat & Tares, WordPress can keep track of where these views come from. Below is the top countries.
It is no surprise that the top country was the USA, and the top four are English speaking countries since Wheat & Tares is in English. What is surprising is that Germany is the top non-English country for views of Wheat & Tares. Also I found it interesting that we have a few views from countries like Myanmar (11) , Azerbaijan (6), and Afghanistan (4). We also had several single views from countries like Iran, Libya, and Gambia, which are probably just accidents (Mother looking over shoulder of Iranian son: “What are you looking at?” son: “I don’t know how this happened, it just popped up, honestly!”)
The top blogger was hawkgrrrl with over 141,000 views for the year. I was second, not due to my writing skills, but the shear number of posts! (quantity over quality!)
The top post of the year was from Elisa, Are Women Quiet Quitting the Church? with 8596 views and 183 comments. Second most viewed post was hawkgrrrl’s How Do You Solve A Problem Like Brad Wilcox? with 7604 views and 93 comments. If you have not read them, go take a look.
Wheat & Tares gets referenced in various places, and sends readers out way. We got over 8000 views from references in Reddit (r/mormon), and almost a 1000 views from references in the Mormon Land feature of the Salt Lake Tribune.
There was almost one post a day this year, with over 315 posts as of Dec 30th, for a total of over 4200 post since Wheat & Tares started using WordPress as its hosting service in 2016. Wheat & Tares started in 2010.
Thank You readers for joining us as we vented, discussed and commiserated with you.
What did you most enjoy about Wheat & Tares? What are your favorite posts from this last year?
Wheat & Tares 
Thanks to all the Wheat & Tares bloggers and to this whole community for your thoughtful posts and comments. They’re a daily highlight for me. Happy New Year!
Thank you BBill, et al. This is my weekly Sunday schooling. I enjoy the conversation and learning.
BBill, are you able to give a breakdown of followers by US state? I am curious.
I would suspect some of the international hits are when we are traveling abroad, not from the locals. I have looked at the site when traveling in countries where the church has minimal presence
Maybe it’s recency bias but I loved Janey’s 4th Nephi dystopia post & her abortion modest proposal was so well done and wildly underviewed. And people’s takes on Wilcox were excellent.
Thanks for that wrap-up, BBill. I had no idea the readership was so large. The commenting community makes this place feel smaller than it is, which is a good thing.
Thanks Elisa. I think people are tired of the abortion debate. Working on those posts helped me clarify my views, and now something will come up in google searches for LDS and pro-choice.
I enjoy all the posts analyzing current Church events, and the context in society as a whole. I don’t post much about current events, so I really appreciate those who do.
At some point I will stop commenting under my alias. Somehow reconnected with a mission colleague via this site. Our shared mission president is a high-profile dude so it is comforting to know some of us are walking around in a state of broken shelf.
Church at 9am this year so I have the rest of the day to read and comment here !!
All comments by JCS are appreciated as he is revealing to us all the evils to watch out for…FYI right now I am wearing my indoor crocs.
In the 1993 C.S. Lewis film biopic, Shadowlands, written by William Nicholson, one of Jack’s quiet students says something poignant after Jack presses him to comment during a lecture. “We read to know we’re not alone,” his student says. Later on after Joy has passed away from bone cancer, Jack adopts this line as his own and shares it as the opening byword with his class.
I have been a passive reader of LDS blogs since Times and Seasons’ was born, but it is Wheat and Tares that drew me in a couple of years ago and compelled me to take the risk of thought sharing in the comments of the blog. It’s been a blessing.
A big thank you to Bishop Bill, Hawkgrrrl, Elisa, Janey and the may others who spark outstanding discussions with thoughtful and compelling essays and participation questions.
I wish everyone a happy new year.
The shelf breaking/house of cards falling/betrayal of trust can be an on-going, traumatic experience for someone once all-in and secure in their former cozy, safe place. Knowing you are not alone that that there are other thoughtful, caring, decent people like you struggling and/or moving on to healthier lives is a benefit and blessing. Thank you, bloggers and commentators, for making this process a little less lonely.
I enjoy W&T because it provides constant reminders of both why I stayed in the LDS church for so long and why I ultimately don’t want to go back.
I stayed for so long because in every ward I found a handful of people that I could discuss my religion
with in a meaningful way, warts and all.
I don’t want to go back because the reports that W&T provides what is happening in the ground in SLC and else where, which is usually easy enough to corroborate through my local friends, reminds me that the church I once loved is long gone and current leadership seems to be unwilling to to do anything but drive it over the cliff.
I can’t really pick a favorite post, although I will say that I find posts by Elisa and Hawkgirl almost always meaningful and insightful, followed by Janey and Bishop Bill. I rarely respond to Jake C’s poetry, but love to read it. Also love when Rich Brown posts, although that is a rare thing. I find the repost of Gospel Tangents a good reminder of just how bizarre my former faith can be.
No Faith, the breakdown for the US is not done by states. BTW, what it you in Afghanistan reading W&T????
With competition from Facebook and Reddit, blogging is not as dominant as it once was. Years ago, Main Street Plaza ended each calendar year with nominations and voting for the best blogging pieces in several categories but, if this were to be done today, few if any nominations would be from other than the W&T and BCC blog sites. That said, I feel that 2022 has been the best year for W&T going back 5 years or longer. This has been possible by the addition of new permabloggers such as Elisa and Janey, as well as the continuing weekly posts from Hawkgirl, Dave B. and Bishop Bill. I like it when Andrew S posts occasionally. For comments I enjoy reading John W and Rick B. I (who am also an engineer) have 2 questions to Bishop Bill. Q1 – If I view a post several times as comments are added, does this count as 1 or multiple hits? Q2 – If I travel to Europe from USA and view a post on my US laptop there, does this register as a US or European hit?
I have been a reader of W&T for the last 4 years or so. What I love about it is that those that write the posts, and the ones that comment, bring up so many points I have never thought of. I especially enjoy the discussion that takes place in the comments. Often I share posts with my spouse and we have long conversations about them. Both my walking partner and I are big fans, so often we have long conversations about the most recent posts. I feel my whole world has opened up to new discovery reading the posts. I have appreciated so many this year that it makes it hard to choose a favorite, but I do have to say every Sunday I always look forward to what Bishop Bill has to say.
I was in Vietnam.
I suspect Afghanistan are from USA military members. The talaban has no risk of LDS missionaries converting the locals, hence no conversion, no faith transition.
When these faith transition issues finally break through in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa…the LDS will be in a real pickle.
I also want to bear witness that this community has been a real lifeline for me personally so thank you! And as 10ac noted, I love Jake C’s poetry but rarely comment as it leaves me speechless.
Here’s to a future year when our faith tradition chooses to engage in spirituality healthy ways that render many of our discussions unnecessary.
Thank you, Wheat & Tares, for another great year! I appreciate very much the work and contributions of each blogger. I stopped attending church exactly 5 years ago, and the W&T community has been my one remaining link to my lifetime tribe. I don’t comment very often, but I read most posts and the related comments. It has been like therapy for me to realize I wasn’t crazy to know that all is not well in Zion (but also recognizing there are some good things about the church that I will always miss/difficult to replace).
Mick, because WordPress differentiates between “visitors” and “views”, I believe that multiple “views” of a post to participate in the comment back and forth would be counted as a separate “views”, but only one visit per your IP address. For example, last year we had 243k visitors, but 1.15m “views”. So we had over 240K unique people that came to the web site at least once, and on average came back 4 times for “views”. This correlates with my observations that posts that have lots of comments that go back and forth have more “views”.
The Q2, it looks like it is using your IP address. So if you are using the hotel Wifi in London, it will register there. If you are using Duck Duck Go with their VPN product, it will show the last place you VPN’ed into before you came to W&T. Please correct me IT people if I got this wrong.
And on an entirely different subject, have you watched the “IT Crowd” on Netflix? Very funny British humor about the IT department at a large corporation.
Is 2023 an appropriate time to take W&T to a new level? By that I mean considering the feasibility of starting a podcast series. Seems like there would be a diverse group of rotating hosts and no shortage of quality guests and topics.
There is a void of independent and thoughtful discussion in the Mormon podcast universe. John Dehlin’s repetitive and agenda driven podcasts are rapidly jumping the proverbial shark.
I enjoy the freshness of its honesty