For most of last year, this blog’s readership was pretty stable: around 1,000 unique visitors stopped by each month. Since then, it’s almost doubled.

In March we’ve had 1,923 visitors: a rise of over 92% over five months. Much of that is coming in from RSS systems like bloglines.com. Normally we can’t ‘see’ those readers, since they read the aricle in their bloglines portal, but some are clicking through. We’d like to know why – and we think one reason is to see comments and higher-resolution copies of diagrams.

The search terms that people use to get to our site are great feedback for us. They help us to prioritise the topics we write about and to see what issues we might be under-evaluating. Of course search engines bring a lot of traffic, and not all of that concerns analyst relations directly. For example there is one name which, when used as a search term, brings more people to our site than any other: Mark Damon Puckett, a ex-Gartner guru and former AR consultant who clearly has a growing fan following in his new career as a writer, musician and one-man Renaissance.

However, it’s also clear that there’s a lot of interest in this blog from people who are concerned with investing in the analyst houses, either as financiers, speculators, regulators or as regular customers. We get more visitors from the US government’s domain than from India. The search terms used to find the blog often suggest that visitors are people looking for insight on topics like Ovum’s IPO, on the revenues and strategies of Gartner’s competitors, on the senior managers of analyst firms. Of course, there also a lot of interest in cross-cultural topics, the impact of analyst firms outside the US and on measurement topics.

If there are topics you’d like us to consider in future postings to Analyst Equity, just let us know.