In both 2011 and 2012, I did a roundup of the most read 200 World Bank blogposts of the year, and compared the performance of the various World Bank blogs in terms of readership. What did blogging at the World Bank in 2013 look like?
Table 1 compares the Bank’s blogs in terms of how many of the 200 most-read posts they produced. As before, I excluded pages that didn’t look like posts – blog home pages, blogger profiles, thematic pages, and so on. I got the data on views from Omniture. This apparently gives more precise – and typically lower – page view figures than the Bank’s blogger platform whose counts are vulnerable to spammers. Readers who manage to read an entire blogpost without clicking on the URL of the post (e.g. through Feedly or the now defunct Google Reader) won't show up in my numbers are readers
Table 1: How the Bank’s blogs fared in 2013
Africa Can End Poverty occupies number one slot for the third year running, but it had only 29 top-200 posts this year compared to 39 last year. This year has been a good year for Voices - Perspectives on Development, which rose from 6th to 2nd position, and for Let’s Talk Development which regained the number 3 slot it occupied in 2011. Open Data continues its rise, up from number 7 to number 4, which it shares this year with Development Impact which drops two places. EduTech drops three places to number 6, while People, Spaces, Deliberation held fairly steady. YouThink is one of three blogs in the top ten for this first year, up from number 22 last year to number 7 this year. Sadly, the inauspiciously named East Asia & the Pacific on the rise continues to fall, sliding from 4th position last year to 9th this year. The second new top-10 entry this year is Shanta Deverajan’s new blog Future Development which notched up a remarkable 8 top-200 posts this year despite being in business for only three months. Sharing number 10 slot is Private Sector Development – another new entry into the top-10.
East Asia isn’t the only blog on a downward trend. Development in a Changing Climate is heading firmly downwards (6th in 2011, 17th in 2012, and 23rd this year), as is Governance for Development (7th in 2011, 14th in 2012, and 23rd this year). Prospects for Development is also trending downwards. Some blogs – such as Arab Voices and Views, Investing in Health, and Political Risk and Emerging Markets – have rarely ever got a top-200 post.
Table 2 lists the top-25 posts of 2013. Click here for the top-200.
Table 2: Top-25 World Bank blog posts of 2013*
* The period covered is January 1, 2013 – December 11, 2013. Data on views were obtained from Omniture, which apparently gives more precise – and typically lower – page view figures than the Bank’s blogger platform
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