Let’s start of the new year here at Redleg Nation by thanking everyone for choosing to come hang out here at this website to share our crazed passion for the Cincinnati Reds. God knows that it hasn’t been easy at times to follow the organization and remain hopeful, but if you’re reading this then you’ve battled through it – and hopefully come out the other side this offseason feeling a bit better.
Second, let me begin the 2020 year by thanking everyone who took the time to write, podcast, and contribute here at Redleg Nation over the last year (and in the past – but I don’t have that list). Thanks to Ashley Davis, Bill Lack, Brian Erts, Chad Dotson, Chris Garber, Clay Marshall, Freekbass, Jackson Thurnquist, Jason Linden, Jeff Carr, Jeff Gangloff, Jim Walker, John Ring, Jordan Barhorst, Mary Beth Ellis, Matt Wilkes, Matt Habel, Nick Carrington, Nick Kirby, Richard Fitch, Ryan Ritchey, Steve Mancuso, Tom Mitsoff, Warrenn Leeman, and Wes Jenkins.
With the year, and now the decade behind us, we’re going to take a look back at 2019 here at Redleg Nation a little bit.
The Top 10 Most Read Articles of 2019
- The Reds are the top candidate to land Shogo Akiyama
- What should the Reds “final offer” be for Francisco Lindor?
- Could the Reds and Yankees be a good match for a trade?
- Reds still in on Realmuto, new name in mix
- Shoenfield’s Reds Blockbuster Idea: A Kris Bryant Trade
- Report: The Reds are out on Dallas Keuchel
- Reds agree to a 3-year deal with outfielder Shogo Akiyama
- Reds notes from the winter meetings for Monday
- Padres interested in Reds top prospect Nick Senzel
- Can the Reds upgrade their rotation by trading for J.A. Happ?
Notice a trend? Apparently everyone likes to read about potential trades and Shogo Akiyama. Not a single one of these posts came during the baseball season. You have to get to spot 28 on the list before you find an article that was written during the season (Reds Rumor: The price on Tanner Roark is untouchable).
The Most Popular Month of 2019
While this is my first full year running Redleg Nation, I’ve been doing the baseball writing thing for a long time now. I began this crazy journey in January of 2006. If you would have told me that December would have had the most traffic during the year, I’d have made a good bet with you that I would have lost. Generally speaking, traffic on baseball websites looks like a bell curve, peaking in June or July, then gradually fading out through December. But this year not only saw December as the most visited month at Redleg Nation in 2019, it was the most visited month in Redleg Nation history, and frankly it wasn’t even remotely close. It had 14.3% more views than the next closest month in the history of the website. Thank you guys and gals for stopping by. And I guess thanks Reds for staying engaged in so many rumors – that can’t hurt.
We Were Doing a Whole Lot of Talking!
The game threads tend to dominate in terms of most commented on articles, and that was true for 2019. For the entire year, though – not including comments that were deleted – Redleg Nation had 41,852 comments posted on it throughout 2019. That’s plenty of discussion, and for the most part, it was clean and civil. Thanks for that.
Lots of Content
The Redleg Nation crew worked their butts off during the year. As a group we published 1060 articles in 2019. Obviously 162 of those were Game Threads, and another 162 of those were Game Recaps. There were also 65 episodes of the Redleg Nation Radio Podcast published during the year.
Google Runs the World
We aren’t sure how you found Redleg Nation, but we are glad that you stuck around. But what we do know is that a whole lot of people find there way to these digital pages via Google. Whether it was from searching, or whether it was from the Google Chrome recommended articles, 14.2% of all the traffic at Redleg Nation in 2019 came from Google. Bleacher Report and the Bleacher Report app contributed another 7.2% of all of the traffic to Redleg Nation this year. Twitter was responsible for 4% of the traffic, while Facebook came in at 2%. No other source reached the 1% mark.
Around the World
Redleg Nation was visited in 178 different countries during 2019. 97.5% of that came from the United States, which of course isn’t surprising at all. Canada was the second on the list, coming in at a whopping 0.42%. Australia was third with 0.22%. A total of 22 different countries sent at least 1000 views this way, including the country of Togo, which until today, I did not know existed. North Korea also provided one single view. I guess they didn’t like what they saw.
Looking Forward
The Redleg Nation stats only go back to 2014, so we don’t have the entire site’s history of traffic. But for what we do have, 2019 was easily the most visited year. Visits were up 36% in 2019 versus 2018. 2019 was also up 23% over the previous most visited year that we’ve got data for.
Here’s to hoping that 2020 is better. Not just for all of us that contribute here at Redleg Nation, but for the Reds, too. After years of what felt like them not trying to do anything but wait around for things to happen, they’ve gone out and tried to make it happen. Thanks for coming along with us on this journey, nation – we appreciate it.
With the world being as small as it is these days, you no longer need a plane to get to your favorite bar to talk about your Reds. You need only a phone.
I moved to Los Angeles around 2013, and surprisingly, most of the people I meet, including non-baseball friends, are from the Midwest. I meet tons of Ohio people, Illinois, Michigan, etc. So the most conversations I get to have about the Reds are when I finally have a moment to sing their praises.
Having sites like this one keep those die hard Reds fans all over the country, and world, informed enough and engaged.
Social Media will one day, if not already, be named another, yet invisible, wonder of the world. At least we get to use it to keep our passions in our lives.
Thank you to everyone running and contributing to this site.
Indeed I have loved this site and being a recent follower it has been a fantastic source for what is going on with the reds. thank you to everyone who makes this awesome website possible??
Or the North Korean viewer was imprisoned for using the internet and is now serving a hard labor sentence.
Thank you all for all you do! (Including the commenters, it’s icing on the article cake)
The North Korean viewer must have seen the word “Red” and thought it had something to do with communism. 🙂
Thanks to Doug and everybody else who contributes to RLN. My hill town in Vermont is not a hot-bed of Reds news and information, so this site is essential to me.
Keep on rolling! I thank all of you guys and gals for contributing and allowing us to follow our Reds from afar, and for letting us chime in. Whether we all agree or not, our passion for the Reds shines through.
Doug even though I don’t agree with everything this site says about a player in the articles, this site has provided up to date news about my favorite teams. You and your writers do a nice job giving statistics are important to us readers and perspective to think about with each rumor, trade or free agent signing.
The podcasts have been wonderful and I look forward to them every week. Even the slow weeks.
Thank you to all the staff here for your time and efforts to keep us Reds fan interested in our team and up to date. Hope you all had a good new year too.
A toast to Doug, Jeff, my fellow writers, and especially all of you. No matter where we are in the world, we can always come home to the Cincinnati Reds here at RLN.
On a personal note, it has been my goal to become a professional columnist since I was 14. You made that possible.
Thank you.
(That means you bear some responsibility, which is somewhat less inspirational.)
Redleg Nation is outstanding. Thanks to you, Doug, and all the writers and commenters. It makes my love of the Reds a daily experience. Thank you.
Do I detect a New Year’s resolution to be more optimistic?
I’d like to state this. . .
Some on here get so disagreeable with the FO for not bringing in the next 24 year old Mickey Mantle for either $5 million per or $55 million per. The thing is, few if any clubs are built as such. Just look at the Angels and Trout. One player would never be enough to turn a basement team into a division contender. You have to consider several positions, several players.
The FO use to look for the reclamation projects. Seemingly, no more, not with this FO personnel.
Last season, they obviously concentrated more on the pitching, and it showed. Our pitching took huge leaps last season. No one pitcher at all. Gray, Roark, and Bauer.
This off season, the FO concentrated more on the offense, of course, with Moose and Shogo, and still don’t look to be done with that. As well as, they also addressed pitching with Miley and several possibilities for the bullpen.
The FO may not have put money into 1 “name” FA who will cost a lot of money but into several different FA’s who will be able to serve a specific purpose to the team but, in total, would cost the same amount of money. In short, they are making this team better.
Of course, the players still need to perform. For instance, if we get an offense like last season, we may get to 500, but not much better than that, I believe.
Story this morning on mlbtraderomors that Reds are still looking at or are one of front runners still for Ozuna interesting.
I’ve never lived in Reds country, but became a life long Reds fan when I was a little catcher and Johnny Bench was The Man. Since then Eric Davis, Barry Larkin, Joey Votto and so many others have given me reason to cheer, cry, and be thrilled by the team I follow and the beautiful game I love.
In my lifetime the game itself has barely changed, but the way we follow it has been transformed. MLBTV, Bill James and his analytics heirs, and the internet allow me to follow and understand the Reds and the game of baseball in new and exciting ways. And for many years now, at the top of that list, sits Redleg Nation. I am ever grateful to Chad Dotson for starting this community, to Jason Linden and Steve Mancuso and so many talented and dedicated writers and now to Doug Gray for maintaining the same impeccable standards, to MBE and all the new writers, and finally to every commenter and avid Reds fan at RLN – thank you for making this such a dependable, invigorating, thought provoking and welcoming online home for this long distance Cincinnati Reds fan. It’s been a long time since the Reds hoisted that last World Series trophy, but RLN is on a very long winning streak. Thank you!
– Chris DeBlois in Atlanta, Georgia
your last paragraph was spot on Doug. I am an old red fan going back to the Frank Robinson days and I tell you I can not remember a worse 5 year stretch in reds history than this one. seems like the loss to the giants in the divisional playoffs in 2012 just really set us off the wrong course and we are just now trying to find our way back.
without rln these past years would have been unbearable. at least we reds fans can share our misery with each other on this site and we all are truly blessed for that
Having grown up in Vandalia and spent my formative years rooting for the Big Red Machine, I was spoiled. I think that there is so much traffic this winter because we yearn for a successful reds team–maybe not a reincarnation of the BRM (impossible), but one that at least makes the playoffs. I’d love to see us win another WS!
Also, we yearn for great writing about our team and you guys provide it. Thanks to all of you who write these great articles and the commenters who post (mostly) thoughtful comments that keep me up to date here in Rangers/Astros country.
While I miss seeing more of Steve and Chad, many thanks to Doug for maintaining this as the best team-centric fan-blog out there. The updates to the site from a technical perspective have been welcome and the new writers along with continued content from some old standbys, have kept the writing at very high standards.
I haven’t been reading as many comments and have commented far less frequently than in the past but I still love the articles and stories. I’m happy that my favorite website is going strongly.
As for the Reds’ off-season, I’ve been pretty happy with the moves so far. I must point out however that I was pretty happy with the moves they made last year as well. I thought trading for Sonny Gray was a brilliant move. I also thought turning Homer’s contract for Wood and Puig was a bold, solid move. I saw wood as the potential ace of the staff in fact. It didn’t work out as planned so we have no idea if the moves this off-season are something we should be excited about or not. Moose at 2B? Count me as skeptical on his ability to be solid at the keystone.
I always look forward to the season though. I thought this team did some good things last year but couldn’t catch a break. I’m hoping for some good things this year and for the ball to bounce the Reds’ way more often. I’d love to see a team that’s in the hint until the very end and a deep playoff run or title would be the best icing a cake could have.