To the readers of this blog: A sneak peek into our statistics – by Sarah Löhle
Hello everyone!
Thank you so much to the 64 people who have already taken the time to answer our questionnaire why they read our blog and what they take away from it!
If you have not yet participated, please take 10-15 minutes to fill out our anonymous questionnaire: https://survey.ph-karlsruhe.de/thelaosexperience_Readership/
Your voice matters! It will not only help me with my Master’s thesis and enhance its statistical significance but it can also directly contribute to shaping the future of this blog. Read more about why I am doing this in my previous post. After I submit my Master’s thesis at the end of September, I will let you know about key findings here on the blog.
Until then, let me tell you some things I could find out about you so far from our statistics on the backend of the blog.
Over the last 11 years, this blog grew from a spontaneous idea into a “real blog” that reaches between two to ten thousand people per month. 16 teams, hundreds of international students, teachers and university faculty from our cooperation partners in Laos, Ghana and Cameroon and beyond as well as guest authors and countless students from the Karlsruhe University of Education have shaped and enriched this blog with their contributions and voices. Today there are 425 posts online including project reports, Letters from…, and academic articles as part of the two main series “Language Learning and Global Citizenship” and “Decolonize your Mind“.
Since the launch of this blog in October 2015, WP Statistics has counted 2.3 million visitors and 6.9 million views from all over the world. Jetpack, which is a plugin by Automattic (WordPress), started recording visitor numbers and views on this blog only in December 2016. Therefore, it sadly did not record the first 14 months of this blog. Back then, the first project participants of the TheLaosExperience-tandem teaching project posted frequently, setting the basis for this blog and for our growing readership as well as the projects to come. Nevertheless, since December 2016, Jetpack recorded over 261,300 views and over 158,600 visitors from almost every country in the world (the map below shows them in blue).
This shows that you are all part of a larger community that spans across the world!
You might wonder why there is such a big gap between the Jetpack numbers and those counted with WP Statistics. So do we, but I will do my best to figure that out and I will tell you when I share the summarised results of the survey and my thesis. So far, I can tell you this:
Both WP Statistics and the free version of Jetpack track visitor numbers and can be accessed directly from the WordPress backend. However, they use different tracking methods (server- side vs. cloud based) and handle bots, visits from logged-in users, and ad-blockers differently. Therefore, the truth and the real visitor numbers probably lie somewhere in between.
All numbers referenced in the following paragraphs refer to the Jetpack statistics found on our backend. Also, check out our screenshots above and below to get a better understanding of who else reads this blog right alongside you.
Using the Jetpack statistics as a conservative and cautious estimate of how many of you there actually are, these numbers still equate to ca. 1.360 visitors and ca. 2.250 views per month on average over the past 10 years. However the average number of views and visits this year was much higher (see image 2 below “views per month”) compared to all the years before. They tripled from 2025 to 2026, and the year is not even over yet.
So far, you really seemed to like what we did in April this year. There were over 14 thousand views! One day after Veronica published her Letter from Ghana on 19 April 2026, Jetpack recorded 1.300 views in one day in total and 400 views for Veronica’s post alone on April 20th, making it our busiest day this year so far.
You also seem to like it better when we post things regularly. In 2021, 2022, and 2023 – during the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting forced pause of the project – we published a lot less than in the years before. Until December 2020 we had published around 5,4 posts on average per month. But then the number dropped to only 1.2 posts per month on average in 2021 and 2022, hitting our lowest number ever in 2023 with only 2 posts throughout the whole year.
This also obviously had an impact on you. The number of views dropped significantly from over 25 thousand in 2020 to just around 18 thousand per year from 2021 to 2023. Since then our number of posts has picked up again a little, which you seem to appreciate: visitor numbers in those months are usually higher than in months without publications. While the growth in views was still minimal in 2024 compared to 2023, it grew a lot more last year and has done so especially this year.
Is this because we are posting more frequently again, or is it because of our new content by our new authors and their posts from our newer partnerships and projects, or is it because we retagged and recategorised all our posts, perhaps making it easier to find what you are looking for?
When did you join our reader community? What brought you here and why do you come back?
We would love to hear more about your story. Let us know in our anonymous questionnaire: https://survey.ph-karlsruhe.de/thelaosexperience_Readership/
We are very much looking forward to getting to know you better and understanding your perspective better. Feel free to share this link with anyone else you know who might have already visited this blog.
Thank you for your support, your insights and your time!
Best regards,
Sarah
Text by Sarah Loehle
Photo by Sarah Loehle (edited with Canva)
Images are screenshots from our backend statistics (Jetpack and WP Statistics)
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