The Most Popular 'mitchmen' Posts of 2017

At this time of year it is my custom to indulge my vanity and geeky side by reviewing the year's posts to see which attracted the most visitor interest. According to my Blogger 'view count' stats*, the 20 below are the most-visited mitchmen posts out of all those first published in 2017

The winner this year is not an A-Z article for once, but a collection of Milking Factory fantasies by different artists. Themed posts like this have done well in previous years (e.g. 'You're Going Down' which was 3^rd in 2015) and I particularly liked this group which included some stunning art by Kalabro. A similar cluster of posts at GMBA(current link in sidebar) also attracted appreciative comments so I wasn't entirely surprised by it's popularity, perhaps by the scale of it's triumph though! It fell just 32 short of Woodunart's record of 1443 last year

A bigger surprise to me was the popularity of my 'hunk' series about Mitch Colby and his fetish & wrestling careers. Every episode scored well and 7 of the 9 made it into the top 20. This was my personal appreciation of a man whose persona seems quite modest but who has some very attractive, masculine qualities. The top scoring article in the set (No 5) featured some of his erotic wrestling performances with some great-looking partners, all wearing sexy gear plus (perhaps most importantly) a spanking giff. Never underestimate the popularity of spanking! The next 3 ranking articles from the set were all about his leather fetish appearances which are my favourites too and probably less written about than 'erotic wrestling', where I know he has a lot of fans. There are lots of sites reporting this subject, so I didn't expect my contribution to grab so much attention. Colby's articles also benefited from being posted early in the year and some episodes were overtaken by later posts in the closing weeks of the year.

Naturally posts from January have an enormous advantage over December (see 'Averaging Hit Rates' below). My articles tend to be 'slow-burners' so it's not surprising that nothing after September even made the cut, which at 359 was higher than both last year's 317 and 331 the year before. Apart from the winner, all articles scored higher than the equivalent ranking position last year, significantly so for the 4 runners-up. (View last years table). This was in the context of increased visits to mitchmen overall.

The good showing by my two articles on Siproiteswas also unexpected, simply because that artist deals often with male to female transformations. I toned down that ingredient for my article, but it's still a bit off-piste for a gay fetish blog! I'm glad that many of you also 'get' this intriguing predicament art. It follows a similar good showing by my review of Yomero's racial and body size transformations posted in 2015.

'A-Z of Fetish Artist' articles usually feature prominently in these charts and 7 made it into the top 20 this year (against 11 last year). This was out of a total 15 published during the year which concluded the first edition of the series. The total was boosted by a couple of one-hit wonders but I think this was a good showing in a relatively weak year (imho) and it reflects the continuing popularity of this series. In 2018 there probably won't be many new ones, as I have reached the letter Z and plan to direct my short term efforts mainly to bringing the early articles up to a better standard.

I didn't do a bondage collection post until the last few days of the year, but despite this the number of articles with photographic content rather than artwork was boosted by Mitch Colby's muscle from 3 last year to 8 this.

In my standard table above, popular multipart series, like Mitch Colby this year and Christmas Criminal last year, can give a distorted view of the subjects people are actually looking at. If I eliminate all but the first entry in these series (those italicised in the table above) the revised chart below is produced.

This approach allows 7 more articles to enter the top 20 including 3 more A-Z's 

(which then claim half the top twenty places). Links are shown for these additions only.

Perhaps more interestingly, the unexpectedly profuse Fetish Art of Beau appears at 15.

This chart also includes 4 single photo posts with modified images and a humorous commentary 

(i.e. 'Control', 2 'Looks' and 'Mitchell's on Holiday'). 

My jokes don't usually do this well, just blame it on Brexit!

I mentioned above how early articles benefit from being available for a longer period of time, so finally, I worked out how this table would look if I took into account the publication date (i.e. days on the site) as well as the total hits.

On this measure (ave hit rate for a year of 365 days) Milking Factory (with 1653) is just pipped to the top spot by my article on 'The Other Zero' (1653) which was published much too late (in October) to break into in the main charts. These two are followed by Zelolee (1404) and much further back by 'Mitchell's on holiday' (1153), Zamok - Part 1 (1144), and Mitch Colby - Part 5 (1099) with Franco - Part 2 (974) squeezing Siproites-1 (973) into 8^th place.

However this method is no less flawed than the simple comparison of totals, giving undue weight to later postings which fit their initial surge of readers into a shorter timescale. As a telling example, my December post of Fujimoto's 'Abducted Cops' has clocked up 211 hits in 16 days so far. That's a hit rate of 4813 per year. Don't ask me why! I exclude obvious anomalies like this but I don't expect 'The Other Zero' or my 'Holiday' post of the lovely Mike Radon to figure so prominently in future surveys! Time will tell.

Remember, this comparison is only made for entertainment, since I don't really know how accurate Google's stats are, I suspect they don't even count people who just browse through the blog roll.