Three Views of Top 10 e-Literate Posts in 2015

It’s the year end, and I have writer’s block. Like many people, I would much prefer to play with numbers than get work done. Instead of just sharing the Top 10 or Top 20 blog posts in terms of 2015 page views, however, I thought it would be interesting to take three different views this time.

Top 10 most-viewed blog posts on e-Literate for 2015

This one is straightforward and ranked by page views, but note that several posts from prior years continue to get a lot of views.

1. How Much Do College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks? (2015)
2. What is a Learning Platform? (2012)
3. A response to USA Today article on Flipped Classroom research (2013)
4. Reuters: Blackboard up for sale, seeking up to $3 billion in auction (2015)
5. First View of Bridge: The new corporate LMS from Instructure (2015)
6. State of the US Higher Education LMS Market: 2014 Edition (2014)
7. Why Google Classroom won’t affect institutional LMS market … yet (2014)
8. Blackboard Ultra and Other Product and Company Updates (2015)
9. No Discernible Growth in US Higher Ed Online Learning (2015)
10. State of the US Higher Education LMS Market: 2015 Edition (2015)

Top 10 most-mentioned blog posts in social media

This one took the most effort. It turns out that Twitter changed how they provide sharing data in May 2015 – essentially they no longer provide it unless you go through their channels and pay them. Our social media sharing plugin for WordPress, wpSocialStats, has not been updated in two years, and it is hard to find a good substitute. What it provides is Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon data. Google Analytics has new capabilities to measure mentions for their “Data Hub” – primarily Diigo, Google+, and Google Groups. What I did was to combine wpSocialStats with Google’s Data Hub minus Twitter results. For what it’s worth, LinkedIn sharing was on the same order as Twitter, but it now dominates this group for e-Literate blog posts.

These are the Top 10 posts in terms of social media mentions created in 2015.

1. McGraw Hill’s New Personalized Learning Authoring Product (2015)
2. Instructure Is Truly Anomalous (2015)
3. How Much Do College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks? (2015)
4. The Starling: Pre-K Ed Tech (2015)
5. Exclusive: University of Phoenix moving from homegrown platform to Blackboard Learn Ultra (2015)
6. No Discernible Growth in US Higher Ed Online Learning (2015)
7. Instructure: Accelerating growth in 3 parallel markets (2015)
8. Reuters: Blackboard up for sale, seeking up to $3 billion in auction (2015)
9. Why LinkedIn Matters (2015)
10. Bad Data Can Lead To Bad Policy: College students don’t spend $1,200+ on textbooks (2015)

Top 10 pages views originating from social media mentions

If we combine these two concepts, the next view is the find the greatest number of pages views in 2015 originating from social media mentions. We only get ~13% of our traffic from social media sources, but this is the first time we’ve analyzed the data from this source.

These are the top 10 most-viewed blog posts in 2015 that originated from social media mentions.

1. State of the US Higher Education LMS Market: 2015 Edition (2015)
2. Reuters: Blackboard up for sale, seeking up to $3 billion in auction (2015)
3. Harmonizing Learning and Education (2015)
4. Cracks In The Foundation Of Disruptive Innovation (2015)
5. Back To The Future: Looking at LMS forecasts from 2011 – 2014 (2015)
6. Why LinkedIn Matters (2015)
7. How Much Do College Students Actually Pay For Textbooks? (2015)
8. Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 1 (2015)
9. U of Phoenix: Losing hundreds of millions of dollars on adaptive-learning LMS bet (2015)
10. Bad Data Can Lead To Bad Policy: College students don’t spend $1,200+ on textbooks (2015)

Notes

I’m not sure why these views are so different. I would note, however, that all of the posts in the second and third lists are from 2015, indicating that social media mentions are shorter-lasting than search rankings and direct views.

Another issue to consider is time lag. The post on McGraw-Hill’s new product has more than double the social media mentions as any other post, yet these mentions have not (yet) driven high page views (at least to the level of becoming top 10).

What do you notice?

Whatever the reasons, there they are – three quite different top 10 lists. Here’s to the new year and a lot more blogging to come.