Its that time of year again where all good (and not so good) bloggers look back over the past year, and I’m no different.

Website and Feed Traffic

2009 was The Morning Brew’s second year of publication, and it started well. The 2008 year in review post was well received by the community and inbound traffic was noticeable higher around New Years Day as as result of that. For the year of 2009 The Morning Brew saw 142000+ visits to the website, along with a lot more people reading from the comfort of their RSS Reader. The traffic for the year grew as the year progressed, with a few notable jumps in traffic.

Morning Brew Traffic 2009

The first major traffic jump was in early June, and was linked to Scott Mitchell including The Morning Brew in his MSDN Magazine Toolbox Column for that month. Arround that time The Morning Brew was also mentioned By Scott Hanselman in his Bytes by MSDN video interview which helped make this the biggest surge in traffic this year. The next traffic jump came in mid July when Scott Hanselman mentioned The Morning Brew once again, this time in a Tweet. Scott further honoured The Brew in early September when he included it in his 2009 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows in the Websites section. As you can see from the graph above this has continued to provide inbound traffic ever since.

The final traffic surge of the year was of my own creation, as The Morning Brew turned 500 editions old in mid December. This resulted in a great many people Tweeting and blogging about The Brew, which helped us end on a high just before the Christmas traffic slump.

The Morning Brew - Daily .NET News and Views In the 500th Edition I included instructions for how you can get a ‘Reader of’ or ‘Contributor to’ badge for your blog which will link back here, hopefully increasing traffic further in 2010.

Of the people visiting the website, the most exciting statistics involve the break down of new and returning visitors. From the graph below it can be seen that the largest number of visitors are those who have been here before.
New vs Returning Vistors 2009

Two other encouraging facts about returning visitors is the frequency of their visits and the number of visits. It would seem that you, dear reader, are very regularly re-visiting the website for your daily hit of .NET News, as seen in the following two breakdowns:

Number of Visits per Visitor

Time since last visit 2009

During 2009 Feed Reader traffic grew from a start just below 2000 readers, touching 5000 readers in the final weeks of December. The growth in subscribers is mostly down to natural growth with a few major jumps which fit with the events outlined above.
Subscribers to The Morning Brew 2009

The Content

This year The Morning Brew has contained (approximately) 3750 links to blog posts and articles. This number is approximate as I only have machine readable record going back to the start February 2009 after the bookmarking site Ma.gnolia suffered a major outage in late January taking all the links used in January with it. This means that the rest of this analysis is based on 11 months of data rather than the full 12.

As regular readers will know, the Links in The Morning Brew are broken into three regular categories, Software, Information and Community, with occasional special sections for major events coverage. The break down of links this year looks something like:

Link Category Breakdown 2009

These links are pulled from around 500 RSS subscriptions to blogs and aggregated feeds which I monitor daily. These feeds will have contained just over 120,000 posts over the past 12 months, all of which I’ve seen and considered for inclusion. Once again, the number of distinct blogs which have featured is high, with some 500+ blogging sites linked to this year, and over 1000 distinct blogs linked to this year. Once again, I would like to think that The Morning Brew has captured the ‘long tail’ of the .NET world as show below:
The Long Tail 2009 - Blogs against posts taken from them

The high spike on the end is made up of a few large blogging sites such as blogs.msdn.com, weblogs.asp.net, CodeBetter.com, LosTechies.com, etc.

This years top 20 most regularly featured bloggers are:

  1. Oren Eini AKA Ayende with 116 links
  2. Phil Haack with 63 links
  3. Davy Brion with 61 links
  4. Mark Needham with 52 links
  5. Eric Lippert with 51 links
  6. Mathew Podwysocki with 48 links
  7. Jimmy Boggard with 41 links
  8. Brad Abrams with 39 links
  9. Scott Hanselman with 39 links
  10. Greg Duncan with 36 links
  11. Miguel de Icaza with 35 links
  12. Scott Guthrie with 31 links
  13. K. Scott Allen with 31 links
  14. Justin Etheredge with 29 links
  15. Eric Nelson with 27 links
  16. Jak Charlton with 26 links
  17. Jeffrey Palermo with 26 links
  18. Rick Strahl with 23 links
  19. Rob Conery with 23 links
  20. Mike Ormond with 22 links
  21. Bertrand Le Roy with 22 links

(OK so there are 21 there, but its only fair since the last two were tied in 22 links)

This year’s Aggregated site leader board looks like:

  1. blogs.msdn.com with 732 links
  2. weblogs.asp.net with 235 links
  3. www.lostechies.com with 172 links
  4. geekswithblogs.net with 146 links
  5. codebetter.com with 141 links
  6. devlicio.us with 115 links
  7. www.codeproject.com with 92 links
  8. elegantcode.com with 49 links
  9. ajaxian.com with 22 links
  10. dotnetslackers.com with 22 links

Some of the key topics that have been covered this year include:

Key Topics 2009
links-per-day 2009
On average the number of links included in The Morning Brew every day has increased over the year, with the busiest week being PDC 2009 in November (as shown by the 5 day rolling average – the black line). The two other biggest peaks are 20th October when beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 was released, and 14th April which was after the 4 day Easter Weekend.

The Final Word

All that remains for this year is for me to thank you the readers of The Morning Brew for your continued readership, everyone whose fine technical content has been included in these posts over the past year (don’t forget to get your Contributors badge)- without you folks there would be no Morning Brew.

The Morning Brew will return on Monday 4th January 2010 where we can start this all over again!

Best wishes for 2010!

Other 2009 Review posts: