Today exactly one year ago this blog saw daylight for the first time. I started the Alpha Vulture blog mainly as a way to receive feedback on my thinking process and stock valuation skills, and think this goal has been achieved quite successfully. I have received plenty of constructive comments, and also some new ideas, so thanks readers! Google Analytics also tells me that most of my visitors are returning visitors, so apparently what I write is not perceived as totally worthless. That’s of course what’s needed to make blogging work: it needs to be beneficial for both the writer and the readers. Hopefully next year the blog continues to be a win-win situation :-).

A birthday post isn’t complete without some fun facts as a present, so here you go:

• Most comments that I receive are spam, 96% percent to be exact. Luckily the spam filter is quite good and managed to catch 99.95% automatically without my intervention :-).
• The most popular post measured by page views was my write-up on AIG, a bit disappointing because it also has to be one of the more superficial write-up’s. Guess a well known company attracts more attention, too bad most of my investments are pretty obscure…
• Measured by average time spend on page my write-up on Rella manages to reach the top spot.  Readers spend more than 16 minutes on average on this page, more than quadruple the average time spend on the AIG page.
• More than 1,000 different search terms were used by visitors originating from a search engine. I have the feeling that the person searching for “ριαλασ ανδρεασ” didn’t find what he was looking for, although if Google thinks differently, who am I to argue?
• The blog has received visitors from 102 different countries, but my popularity in Africa needs some work. The same can be said about my popularity in South Dakota: despite thousands of visitors originating from the U.S. not a single one came from South Dakota. What are the odds of that happening?