To be honest, we at FBTG are not ones for anniversaries. We see more reason to celebrate current achievements and successes than to look back wistfully at events that mattered x years ago. That said, we have made it a tradition to create a post each time this small, independent Football culture blog ticks over another year each time January comes around. Work and personal commitments caused us to forego a gratuitous upload on our actual birthday earlier this month, so instead we chose to do something different to celebrate 5 years of Football culture blogging.

We took a big dive into our website traffic statistics in order to get better insights into what the past 5 years have meant in terms of numbers and data. In this post we present a few key insights about From Boothferry To Germany that are entirely thanks to you guys. Enjoy.

One key stat that we are proud to highlight is 4 consecutive years of growth. After our first year, the amount of visits our blog has received has grown each year without fail, and the early insights from the start of 2021 indicate that we are still growing. While continued growth might be the most basic of objectives for any kind of media outlet, we are proud to have achieved this purely by organic means – not a single cent has ever been spent in promoting From Boothfery To Germany. The year on year growth in visits breaks down as follows;

Growth in traffic is always the first metric of success, and in this regard our website has gone from strength to strength. However, anybody working in the digital sphere knows that measurements of content engagement are also indicative of good work. Way back in our first year of writing about global Football fan culture, we recall days and sometimes weeks that passed without a comment or like on our posts. Thankfully our writing has improved massively since then, and we believe this is reflected in the increasing average amount of likes per post. We have seen consistent yearly improvements in this metric, and the average likes per post we saw in 2020 was three times as high as it was in 2016;

Unfortunately, in the past 2 years we struggled to publish as many posts as we did in the 2 proceeding years. The FBTG editorial team really stepped the game up where frequency of publishing posts was concerned in 2017 and then continued that same momentum a year later in 2018 – the year we published more blog posts than any other. However, the following year in 2019 our team decreased in size and our responsibilities elsewhere in life grew, which immediately compromised our ability to write and publish. This trend continued into 2020 when we published even fewer posts. We have however been focussing on larger writing projects that have taken up more time (that we hope to be able to share with you sooner rather than later). The development of the number of blog posts published on From Boothferry To Germany each year breaks down thusly;

Has our writing style changed at all over half a decade? Very much so. We quickly moved away from a “newsy” style of writing and instead focussed consciously on narrative and prose – going beyond face level observations to try and explore more profound stories that influence fan behaviour around the world in way that is concise, accurate and entertaining. This is never easy and always requires a solid amount of research as well as more patience than we are often capable of. This perhaps partly also explains a dip in the frequency of our posts, but hopefully it helps FBTG stand out as a blog worth coming back to. In qualitative terms, we certainly believe that our house style has never been better. This of course is entirely subjective, but it is interesting (at least for us) to know that our average amount of words per blog post rose each year between 2016 and 2019 before reducing marginally in 2020;

We like to see ourselves as a Football culture blog with a global focus. Chasing cheap traffic by click-baiting the fuck out of the Big Name teams has never been our style. We avoid tedious and predictable content about the bigger clubs whose replica shirts can be purchased at any given airport and instead choose to shine a light on smaller Football clubs and fan bases. And our global perspective is probably the reason behind the wide geographical spread of our readership;

From Boothferry To Germany has received views from 131 countries and territories.

These locations are diverse as Andorra, Réunion, St. Lucia, New Caledonia and Oman. A major thank you and shout out to anybody from any of those places – comment below where you are reading this and what club you support! Yet inevitably there is a list of countries where a larger proportion of our page views come from. The pie chart below gives a simple overview of where the bulk of our traffic originates.

5 of the top 9 countries that contribute to our traffic are English speaking markets, which makes total sense. The United Kingdom leads the way by a considerable margin, and the USA ranks in at a solid third place. Australia and New Zealand also make the top 9 – understandably so as we have historically dedicated time to writing about the Football fan scenes in these 2 antipodean nations. However, Canada is a surprise entry in our top list given the fact that we, to the best of our knowledge, have never written a post about Canadian fan culture. Not saying that we won’t though….

Germany is the country that contributes the second single highest number of views, and logically so given the amount of writing we have dedicated to the country and its fans. Additionally, Spain entered the top end of the list – likely as a consequence of a huge amount of blog posts we wrote about fan groups on the Iberian Peninsula from the tail end of 2018 and throughout 2019. The rest of the world accounts for just over a quarter of all-time visits, and the other two countries that have given us a substantial amount of views are Malaysia and Indonesia. Though this may appear odd at first, they are two countries that we have dedicated a lot of time and effort into reading and writing about, and we are true nerds about the 2 countries’ respective histories and cultures. In truth, there are probably more blog posts about Malaysian and Indonesian fans coming to you soon on From Boothferry To Germany!

Cheers guys. Let’s see what the next 5 years bring.

fbtg