My Brief Love Affair with China, and the Rise and Fall of My WordPress Stats

 

I know this is what you’ve all been waiting for – an update on my WordPress stats.

Despite my lack of blogging in 2025 (a total of eight blog posts), the number of views I had set an all-time record, and it wasn’t even close.

For 2025, my blog had over 518,000 views. To put that in perspective, I had 18,000 views in 2015, my first year of blogging. That number slowly grew each year, and then it peaked in 2021 at 209,000 views. And those numbers were the result of posting every single day during that 2015-2021 period. After 2021, the views tarted to drop, and in 2024 I had 71,000 views.

So why the big jump in 2025?

One word: China.

Of those 518,000 views, 459,000 of them were from China!

And those views took place during a relatively limited time frame in 2025, as the chart below shows.

 

This chart highlights a couple of items. First, prior to September, my blog was hovering around 1,000 views per week, and then after that, with the exception of one week in October, the views started to grow, and to then explode. My weekly views peaked at the end of December, reaching 93,000 for one week! To put that in perspective, when I started blogging, it took me three and  half years to reach a cumulative total of 93,000 views. And here I achieved that number in one week.

But the above chart also shows how engaged my Chinese audience was. During the span from April to December, there were a whopping 20 comments, despite the 500,000 views (of which 459,000 were from China).

I should note that I was not alone in this experience.

The wonderful blogger Tippy noticed back in September that his blog went from getting about 100 views per days to over 2,000. And all because of China as well. Online chat boards were full of similar results.

So what caused such an increase?

My guess is that some Chinese firms were building AI software, and wanted to purposely populate their data with information that could be used for hallucinatory purposes.

What’s that mean? From Grammarly:

AI hallucinations occur when AI tools generate incorrect information while appearing confident. These errors can vary from minor inaccuracies, such as misstating a historical date, to seriously misleading information, such as recommending outdated or harmful health remedies. AI hallucinations can happen in systems powered by large language models (LLMs) and other AI technologies, including image generation systems.

So these Chinese AI tools probably wanted to have some nonsense data they could feed into their large language models to throw users off, and what better place to find such nonsense than a blog devoted to blather.

But then the drop in views was sudden and severe.

During the last week of 2025, I had over 92,000 views from China. The very next week, I had six.

I kept wondering, was it something I said? Or did the Chinese AI companies finally realize that my blog posts were beyond the realm of hallucination, and that no one in their right mind would believe a word of what they were reading if it was based on my blog posts?

So there’s the story of my brief love affair with China. After all, how could I not love someone who was viewing so many of my posts?

And there, sadly,  is also the story of the rise and fall of my blog stats.

However, to end on a positive note, it does appear other Asian countries have started to discover my blather, as I’ve recently noticed a significant increase in the number of views originating from Singapore and Hong Kong.

I wonder how long until they realize that there’s no substance at all to my blog posts, but that it’s pure blather?

P.S. Just to warn you, I plan to write another stat-focused blog based on a number in the very first chart shown above. Somehow I missed that milestone that happened sometime during 2025…