I’m not sure this Website is ready for a “Most Popular Articles” feature as it has only been active for about six months. But I needed three articles for December 30 and I couldn’t think of anything better to write. But don’t let that deter you from reading on, for we can both discover something interesting and useful about what I have managed to accomplish with this site in the past six months.
When I originally created the Middle-earth sub-domain for Xenite.Org I thought it would be a convenient repository for my old Suite101 articles. But looking through my private archive of those articles I realized that many of them were so dated and so closely tied to the development of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” movies there seemed little point in republishing them.
On the other hand, many of the articles struck me as relevant and timely, but not quite what I would want to write today. Still, I felt they should be archived on one of my own sites, thinking I might return to them in the future. But then I also realized I could use the site to publish brief articles about Middle-earth Talk Radio and a couple of Tolkien-related gamer journals (of which so far I have only addressed one).
Still, that didn’t seem very interesting to me either. After all, simply writing about what has been done and read elsewhere doesn’t provide much incentive for people to visit a Website, much less link to it, talk about it, or come back to it. I wanted something different, something new.
There was an essay in the old Suite101 collection, “The Historic Baranduin”, which I had originally written as a demo article for a book proposal. Unfortunately I couldn’t drum up sufficient interest in such a book to take the project anywhere, so I published the essay on Suite101. While browsing the essay archive in my notes I thought about what that book project might have looked like. I wanted a sort of “you are there” magazine format in a collection of articles, very much like you would read in National Geographic or The Smithsonian.
Lacking time to write books I still felt I could put together some interesting articles in the same style. Not quite fan fiction, they are not quite non-fiction. Another article, one of the last I wrote for Suite101 (and yet to be republished here on Xenite) was “Celeborn Unplugged” (UPDATE: “Celeborn Unplugged” is now available on Xenite.Org). Of all the Suite101 articles I wrote (other than the review of the LoTR Internet preview of 2000) I think that one proved to be the most popular and influential. I wanted this new collection of articles to be that popular.
So it’s not easy to create popular articles. You can plan all the great things in the world but people just may not respond to what you write. As it turns out, the most popular article of the year came from that new collection. I wish I could say all the articles in the collection received as strong a response but that did not happen. The Middle-earth Unplugged category is successful enough that I want to write more of these articles. The problem is that they require a LOT of research. And I just haven’t had much time for research the past couple of months.
So as my work on Middle-earth Unplugged wound down I realized I needed to find something else to replace those articles in their Friday timeslots. But I’m getting ahead of myself. About the same time I started working on the “Unplugged” articles I realized that there was a problem on the Web. A lot of cheap, made-for-advertising Websites like Yahoo! Answers were publishing random Tolkien and Hobbit questions, waiting for people to provide answers. On a very few rare occasions the quality of the answers has turned out okay, but for the most part the questions either receive no answers, or the answers are silly nonsense.
I know from the email I have received through the years that there is an immense amount of curiosity about Tolkien and Middle-earth out there. In fact, more than a few of the old Suite101 essays were written in response to reader questions. But it takes a lot of time to write a full-blown essay so I decided to begin a series of short question-and-answer articles (and, as it turns out, some of the answers are long enough to be essays).
I launched this series of question and answer articles at the same time I launched the “Unplugged” series. Unlike the Middle-earth Unplugged articles I don’t need to spend THAT much time doing research for the q-and-a articles, although some of them certainly turned into major productions. Fortunately, I have been able to publish 10 question-and-answer features each week for several months.
It’s hard to say where the most interest has fallen on the Website. I can easily point to the most popular articles but some sections of the site are really built for random visitors. What I did not anticipate was that so many people would spend so much time reading articles on the site. In terms of reader interest as measured by number of pages read, number of return visits, and time spent on site (all of which are only crudely measured by today’s metrics software) the Middle-earth sub-domain has proven to be the most engaging Website I’ve ever created. And I’ve created a LOT of Websites.
I started out doing this for myself but I find that I’ve been doing it for a lot of other people too. That is most gratifying. While I’m not yet serving 30,000 weekly visitors (which is how many people read the Suite101 column at the height of its popularity) I have watched the traffic to this site increase week-by-week. This sub-domain is now the second most popular section on Xenite.Org and is the fourth most popular “site” in the entire Xenite network. I can only say I hope to make 2012 as interesting or better for you.
Finally, I decided to replace the “Middle-earth Unplugged” articles with interviews. I decided to interview Tolkien scholars because I felt that it would be easier to ask them questions than to do research for the Unplugged articles. Problem is, to ask interesting questions you have to do a lot of research — I have probably read more Tolkien books and papers in the last 2-3 months than in the last 10 years. But that’s a good thing.
Still, the interviews series has ground to a halt. There are more scholars whom I want to interview and I’ll get to them. But I have to figure out a better way of managing the schedule. Meanwhile, Middle-earth will continue to publish such content as I can quickly put together.
In terms of “sections” or “categories”, the interview articles have been the most popular by far. If I could only do interviews each week this Website would become very popular very quickly. I’m afraid that just isn’t possible. With all that said, if you’re still reading this article, here are the top articles (by category) for 2011.
Middle-earth Unplugged
Interviews with the Scholars
- An Interview with John Rateliff
- An Interview with Janet Brennan Croft
- An Interview with Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull
Middle-earth and Tolkien News
- More From Christopher Tolkien on LoTR Movies (article from 2001)
- Lord of the Rings Movie Internet Trailer Preview (article from 2000)
Middle-earth Questions and Answers
- Are the Maps at the Beginning of Each LoTR Book Hand Drawn by Tolkien?
- In What Order Should J.R.R> Tolkien’s Books Be Read?
- Who Is Gandalf Stormcrow?
Middle-earth Journals
Middle-earth Feature Articles
Final Thoughts … Or, What It All Means
Of all the traffic this small collection of articles drew, the first one (“Horror in the Woods: How Men Live in Mirkwood”) received approximately half that traffic. I wish I could write articles like that every week. Just one a month would be fantastic. Personally, I think “Rhudaur and the Little Folk” is pretty good, but I think I understand why “Horror in the Woods” became so popular. It was quickly noticed by the Tolkien gaming community (and a recommendation from Francesco Nepitello, author of “The One Ring” board game definitely helped).
The scholar interviews have been very solid. Every one of them has been read by hundreds of people. The first one, with Janet Brennan Croft, continues to do well. She is the editor of the Mythopoeic Society’s journal Mythlore and so is quite well-known in the scholarly community. John Rateliff’s interview has also performed strongly because his book, The History of The Hobbit, is a major piece of Tolkien scholarship that comes close to matching Christopher Tolkien’s work (which though that is a credit to John’s scholarship, I must concede owes something to the fact that he was the designated “Hobbit” manuscript researcher/analyst).
I cannot explain why any of the contemporary news articles I have published (mostly about hobbit plays in local theaters) failed to get into the top list. When I published those articles I saw fairly steady interest in them, but nothing like the major spikes in traffic generated by these other articles. The old news articles listed here were originally published on Xenite.Org’s original LoTR Movies News site — which no longer exists. Because there are so many links pointing to those articles I had to restore them after I noticed a lot of people trying to find them.
Curiously, there was a recent discussion in a Tolkien forum (I think at TheOneRing.Net) where someone linked to the article about the Internet Trailer Preview. I guess that’s an example of what Web marketers call “evergreen content”. It’s still interesting and relevant after 11-1/2 years. I embedded the trailer from YouTube so that people could watch it after reading the article.
The Middle-earth Journals category gets some regular traffic but not much. I was surprised to see that one article received so much interest. I haven’t had time to see where that came from. I do plan to write about the Other Minds journal in 2012. I am also thinking about what other journals (which must be completely available online, for free) that I can document next year.
One category you won’t find listed here is the Middle-earth Talk Radio category. Yes, people read those articles. Unfortunately, they’re just not as popular as other articles. I can see the statistics for the Middle-earth Radio Website and I know that this Website sends only a small fraction of traffic there, but I created that category because my friend Hawke has changed URLs on the Middle-earth Radio Website so often that many of the episodes are hard to find. If nothing else, these new links should help the search engines point people to the right place.
Maybe this time next year I’ll write another “most popular articles” review. It will be interesting to see how well the site has done. So far, I think it’s done pretty well. I haven’t done much to promote this site. I do want to thank all the people who have linked here and recommended these articles.
May 2012 bring you many new and interesting things to read.
