A friend, data, and data analytics brought me back to continue writing in JC Economics Essays again
Story time!
I had stopped blogging on this site for a long time, and gone on to do many other things with my life.
But one day, I bumped into a friend (who was a former student).
He said, somewhat melodramatically, "Did you know that your economics essay blog, the uncreatively named one, saved my economics grade, and probably my life?"
"You must be joking," I said.
"No, no, today I am doing data analytics and economics turned out to be so important in it!"
His parting shot to me was, "You should continue that blog, man. It helped me understand economics, or at the very least, pass my H2 and H3. You saved lives. Maybe you can continue to save lives."
I went back to have a look at the data that Blogger had, and extracted some data.
Did I really help many people? I knew students and undergrads were reading my blog, but just how many were there?
It turns out, that over the past 10 years, I have had about 344,000 views of my economics blog. Put differently, on average it works out to be around 34,000 views per year.
(This is despite the fact that I had stopped writing for many years.)
From 2018 to 2021, there had been a decline in the number of readers, as I had dropped in the search rankings.
Well, I thought to myself, it was only to be expected. I had stopped writing for many years, and in the meantime, many other economics writers, bloggers, and tutors had appeared on the scene.
It was getting to be a crowded market (sorry, occupational hazard that from time to time, I might spew economics terms).
But when I did post economics articles or write ups, there were thousands of readers (probably hardworking or desperate students!), with a few occasions of more than 6,000 views a month. At its peak, this humble economics essays blog managed to get 8,500 views.
I think most people cannot claim that they get that kind of readership from an economics blog.
Since the visitor count showed around 109,000 unique visitors over a longer period of time, I guess that it was fairly certain that each person reading the blog read more than 3.2 articles each.
The top economics essays post was "Explain the main types of unemployment in Singapore" with a whopping ~8,000 views.
And the Central Problem of Economics received ~5,000 views.
While there were times that I wrote articles on the US and UK economy, JC Economics Essays is mainly targeted at students and undergraduates in Singapore (although, I am delighted if I can help people from around the world).
Did I hit the target?
It turns out that the majority of the page views do come from Singapore (230,000 out of 344,000 views, or two-thirds of page views), though surprisingly there are many from Russia and other parts of the world.
Maybe people around the world do want to learn more about Singapore's economy... or our A level economics examinations. Or perhaps H1, H2, and H3 intrigues them, and they end up viewing this website.
Blogger also had this visualisation, which was interesting. Chrome and Safari provided the greatest pageviews by browser, but I learnt new things like Opera, SamsungBrowser, and EzineArticlesLinkScanner. The Internet does teach me new things each day.
There were other useful data that I learnt, but to conclude this post:
I was happy to bump into a friend and former student.
And I am happy to have helped him in his economics journey at A levels.
Because he mentioned data, analytics, and visualisations, I ended up looking at Blogger for data and this post was born.
I suppose it is a long and roundabout way of saying:
I am back!
And I will be posting on various current economics topics, including cryptocurrency (which has greatly interested me and many, many others).
I will also be posting on university admissions and scholarships since these are important to students and undergraduates, and I have a wealth of knowledge to share. These articles have been very useful for students too.
And finally, from time to time, I will be posting on writing economics essays (which, after all, is what this economics blog is all about), including how to write, how to make an argument, how to write an evaluative conclusion, and how to read and interpret economic data.
Thank you for reading, and cheers.
JC Economics Essays
