The Brick Fan 2017 Recap

2017 is now over and that means we can now take a look at the website traffic here on The Brick Fan as well as other miscellaneous stats. We ended the year at 9,081,785 page views which is a 3% drop from 2016 while unique visits went down 4%.

As for the numbers per month, we averaged about 756,000 page views per month with January being the busiest month due to the Toy Fair news. This year’s Toy Fairs will be at the end of the month so I expect traffic will spike in February instead of January. Our highest recorded day was February 18 as we hit just under 60,000 page views for the New York Toy Fair coverage.

Some other random high traffic days include:

– January 3: New Rumors of LEGO Star Wars UCS Millennium Falcon Coming

– April 22: LEGO Creator Fairground Carousel (10256) Rumored for June Release

– May 1: LEGO Marvel Super Heroes Thor: Ragnarok Box Art Images

– August 31: LEGO Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series Millennium Falcon (75192) Officially Announced

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For our social media pages, we didn’t really grow that much in terms of followers for some of the traditional sites like Facebook and Twitter. I’m actually not sure why it didn’t grow as much as I expected since I am pretty active on them. For Facebook, we ended the year at 12,936 likes (14% increase from 2016) while on Twitter, we had 7,343 followers (8% increase).

As for Instagram, we actually ended right at 10,000 followers which was a 74.5% increase from last year. I’m super excited about that and I’ll be continuing to post some good content on there.

For the almost non-existant Google+, we’re at 2,276 followers. That’s a whopping 71 new followers in the whole year. It was hyped to be a rival network to the other social media sites a few years ago but it’s dying a slow death.

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In terms of comparing the site to other sites on the internet, Alexa ranks the site at 88,365 which is up 19,315 spots from 2016 and 38,085 in the US.

There were a total of 893 posts during 2016 with 5,354 comments on the posts. Engagement has been up significantly, almost a 30% increase from the previous year with our most debated post being the LEGO Star Wars UCS Millennium Falcon Release Debacle.

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Overall, I expected traffic to pass 2016 totals early in the year but as the months went by, it seemed that we wouldn’t pass it. I didn’t worry too much about it as it is still holding steady. It seems that other LEGO new sites have lowered traffic including Brickset which is surprising. There is more “competition” in terms of LEGO news sites that have emerged last year including YouTube channels and Instagram post blogs. Some of the newer ones focus more on leaked images to get traffic but what can you do. We obviously can not post these images according to the LAN rules and we will still adhere to them.

Another possible reason of the dropped traffic is probably LEGO has peaked for the time being. The LEGO Batman Movie and The LEGO Ninjago Movie were some popular themes for 2017 but some themes like Star Wars and Super Heroes had a mediocre product lineup. 2018 however, looks very promising so hopefully we have a to talk about this year.

For 2018, I have some big changes planned for sometime in February which may cause some ruckus but hopefully it’ll be smooth. Thank you for continuing to visit The Brick Fan for your source of LEGO news as well as reviews of various sets throughout the year. It’s still a little difficult to run the site as a mostly one-man operation but I’m glad that I can still keep it running smoothly as possible. We’re still part of the LEGO Ambassador Network and we hope to have some fun stuff planned for the readers this year.

Again, thank you everyone for helping support The Brick Fan and I’m very excited to see what 2018 brings for us.