Who reads Walt Whiteman's World?

Ed. here. An online comment to which I won't provide a link asked, "Who reads Walt Whiteman?" That bit of snark prompted me to check the analytics for the 9+ years we've been blogging, and I thought I'd share some of the stats with you, just FYI.

Here's a map showing where our readers live -- the top 10 countries at least.

Leading the list -- no surprise -- is the Excited States of America, 27.8%. Second place is something of a shocker, considering how little Walt writes in French or about France. Yes, France, at 23.6%. Russia is a solid third at 15.7%, and don't tell me it's all hackers trying to influence US elections! Canada's in fourth with 11.0% and Not-so-great Britain comes fifth at 10.0%.

Then there's a considerable gap until you get to number six, Germany, 2.9%, followed closely by Italy with 2.8%. The Italians are rising fast, though, with a lot of interest in Europe's migrant crisis. Brazil has eighth spot, with 2.3%. Belgium and Ukraine occupy the last two places, with 2.0% and 1.9% respectively.

As you might expect, the overwhelming majority of Walt's readers are running Windows (67%). 11% are Mac lovers, taking a break from designing and other graphic endeavours, no doubt. 8% are in the Linux world, and 3% use Unix. Yes, some folks are getting to us on their iPhones (3%) and iPads (1%). And there are still a few (less than 1%) using Blackberries.

When it comes to browsers, Chrome is the frontrunner, with 39% of WWW readers preferring the Google product. So do we. We switched from Internet Explorer (in third place with 18%) long ago, even before we made the leap from Windows XP to Win10. Firefox is in second place with 29%. Safari comes fourth with 6%, about the twice the number as users of Opera, 3%. Half a dozen other browsers follow, with 1% or less.

Getting back to our readers themselves, the stats give the lie to the canard that Walt Whiteman's World is only for white anglophones. We have readers of every race, in every corner of the world, except for perhaps Antarctica. Following on the top 10 come scads of hits from China (using a VPN, Agent 88 says), south Asia, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa (not just South Africa), parts of the Middle Eastern sandpit, and the Spanish-speaking parts of Latin America (including Texas). Truly, then, Walt Whiteman's World encompasses the whole world.