About 2013

The GFF factory

Henning Eskol - Martin Joergensen

You might have noticed that Christmas is close and as it is with Christmas, New Year is close on its heels.
And as always I tend to look back on the year that has passed with my GFF glasses on, trying to asses the status of the site and get a picture of what has been going on.

Of course I know in broad lines what has happened, and the general picture of what has been published, what has been popular and what hasn't, but it's always fun to scrutinize the details, and this year I thought I'd make a hitlist of the most read articles and most visited pages during the year.

Video, video

It might not come as a big surprise that the video section has swept the shelves for all prizes, and once again tops the charts big time.
Our videos have by far been the most popular section on the site practically since the day they were introduced in December 2009.

The GFF video channel became an overnight success, and as I write this we're hosting about 5,000 videos on fly tying and fly fishing, and have passed 18 million views during these past four years.
I have written a whole article about this single section.

5,000 videos

Martin Joergensen

What's hot?

And as colorful bars.

Apart from the videos, which are clearly in a league of their own, the popular sections of the site are the same as they were before the videos were introduced.
The top 10 list of sections in 2013 looks like this:

1) Videos
2) Patterns
3) Tie better
4) Front page
5) Tie better
6) Gallery
7) Streamers
8) Reviews
9) Pix
10) Staff

All 50 as a graph with links.

Single most popular articles in 2013 are also basically the same ones as they have been for a while:

1) First setup
2) How to fish with more than one fly
3) Knots for the fly fisherman
4) The Perfect Woolly
5) Classic Wet Flies
6) Bubble float
7) Shark's Caddis Larva
8) Beginner's Buzzer
9) Light Curing Resins
10) Strike Indicator Scientology

Click on the small graph to the right and you will ghet a list of the 50 most read articles on GFF and links to them.

Something old and something new

None of these are new articles, and we have to go to a 22nd place to find an article from 2013, the One Mallard Shrimp, and shrimps are definitely a popular subject represented by several patterns and articles on our top 50 of 2013.
The list also contains articles, which we published a decade or more ago such as our knots articles, an ancient article about fishing a fly on a bubble float and several articles on hooks, fly lines and leaders.
But adding new material isn't quite in vain, and even though newer articles fight hard with old material, we do get a hit now and then, like the recent article on light curing resins and patterns such as the aforementioned shrimp flies and the ever young Mickey Finn.

Popular stuff

Martin Joergensen - Radoslav Kiskinov - Rouven Kempkes

The story continues

The Global FlyFisher will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2014, and I will undoubtedly do an article like this when the next year has gone. Few web sites can pride themselves of a 20 year history, and as far as I know there are no fly-fishing web sites that can compete with us when it comes to age. According to my knowledge there aren't many that have the amount of content either. 5,000 videos as mentioned, about 1,500 full articles comprising more than 6,000 pages and links to tens of thousands of images, more than 350 blog entries, 630 patterns in our pattern database and much, much more.
With a fairly steady publishing rate of 8-10 new articles per month the last few years and many planned for the future, expect us to continue to grow the coming years.
There's no shortage of ideas and goodwill, but the number of hours available of course sets a limit.
So if you yourself have something you want to share, feel free to contact us. We always welcome articles, new patterns, images or other contributions.

In the news... not

I started up a news section this year... and it withered and dwindled and simply died a slow death. That was mainly my own fault, since a news section is depending on news, and I was the one that was supposed to dig them out, write them, edit them and publish them.
That was actually a whole lot of work!
The section isn't quite dead yet, but writing several news stories every week and finding images for them is not going to be on my task list. Anybody with a small journalist in their stomach who wants to try their hand on the task, please let me know.