WildSnow Top Blog Posts of 2016

Hi Kevin, unlike some of the super commercialized websites out there, we don’t live by metrics, instead we go with our gut. Thus, for this post we looked at every post of 2016 and combined our overall impression of the post, as well as the type and yes sometimes the number of comments, to come up with our “top” post. I included some of the more recent posts simply because I had the feeling readers found them interesting, and in the case of Salomon my feeling was that the issue of re-branded gear came up and it’s important for people planning their shopping over the next year.

In reality, some of our News Roundups got a lot of reading and a lot of comments as well, but most of those didn’t do it for me as “Top Posts” so I left most out during the curation.

We actually don’t put much energy into developing metrics on what our most viewed posts are. Instead, again, we go with our gut feelings on what to publish, for better or worse.

This is a very different philosophy than that of many internet publishers, who spend literally thousands of hours obsessing on their numbers, and let the numbers lead them.

What originally got me off the metrics kick (yes, for a while I sat here drooling over Google Analytics, thinking it was the key to the universe) was when I realized that nearly all website metrics are skewed by what has become an unbelievable amount of random criminal bot traffic and targeted attacks (said by some to be something around 50% of all internet bandwidth!), much of which is said to be very sophisticated in that it’s designed to emulate humans who are web browsing. (And yes, much of this traffic comes from Russian and Ukranian IP numbers, but U.S. IP numbers are at the top of the list as well… Indeed, we get attacked by “Russia” all the time, though I doubt any of it comes from Vladimir Putin, but instead it comes from what has become a huge virtually unregulated money generating hacking industry in those countries, and in other Eastern Block countries as well.)

Just an FYI on the above, over the past few years I refined our methods of website defense and we’ve filtered our traffic to a much more realistic flow of “real” people. It was a tough journey and I learned a lot of stuff, and our methods are working for now. We’re actually saving some money by not needing as much server bandwidth as we used to, because we’re doing better blocking of the attacks. We’re also giving our advertisers a better deal because they pay for “clean” traffic rather than numbers inflated by the criminal traffic. Though it’s all an imperfect science and there is no way of knowing what new exploit or attack method the criminals are going to try next.

Funny thing is, the old tried and true attack methods still work best. Witness recent events, and watch out for what you do with your emails (smile).

Oh, and as for the order of the posts, they’re simply chronological with newest first. Not in the order of “most viewed” or anything like that.

Lou

Lou, Not all traffic from Russia is criminal! I read your site for 2 years and find a huge amount of useful information. But sometimes its really hard to get it, because of “criminal traffic filters” (smile).

I wish you good luck and a lot of snow in 2017

Evgeny,
Moscow, Russia.