2021 Interconnected Wrap-Up: Readership Stats and Breakdown

This article was originally published on Interconnected.blog in both English and Chinese on December 20, 2021.

As we near the end of 2021, it’s time for a wrap-up post on Interconnected.

We wrote a similar post last year in “Open Source, Open Stats, Open Development”, where we provided a rough breakdown of our audience. We also shared details and learnings about our “open source first” tech stack built on Ghost.org, which has not changed much.

Here’s a similar breakdown for 2021.

Top 15 Geographies

Below are the top 15 geographical locations of readership in 2021 with proportional percentages:

• US (28%)
• China (12%)
• Singapore (7%)
• India (6%)
• Hong Kong (4%)
• UK (3%)
• Canada (3%)
• Malaysia (3%)
• Taiwan (2%)
• Australia (2%)
• France (2%)
• Germany (2%)
• Japan (2%)
• Brazil (1%)
• Netherlands (1%)

One interesting evolution from last year’s breakdown is a more evenly distributed readership. The top two locations from last year were the US (~45%) followed by China (~10%), while other geographies were negligible. Now, we have meaningful readership from Singapore, India, the UK, and many other places.

This more even distribution speaks to the mission of Interconnected, where we try to break down and analyze the underlying connections between different industries, markets, and trends of innovation across geographies. That’s why our top three category tags are: Open Source, Cloud Industry, Developer – all global topics. I’m also glad to see our readership reaching almost full coverage in Africa, except for Sierra Leone and Western Sahara (technically a disputed territory mostly administered by Morocco).

Top 15 Articles

Here’s the list of our top 15 articles in 2021 by traffic.

• Jack Ma's Bund Finance Summit Speech (one of our few trilingual articles, available in English, Chinese, and Japanese)
• Zhang Yiming’s Last Speech
• Low Code No Code, Part II: How to Ride This Wave
• RISC-V, China, Nightingales
• Low Code No Code, Part I: Use Cases and Landscape
• Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business?
• China's “Semiconductor Theranos”: HSMC
• What Does Agora ($API) Do?
• Morris Chang, Global Semiconductor Competition, Make “Making Stuff” Cool
• Zhang Yiming's Resignation
• What Does Databricks Do?
• Is “ByteDance Cloud” A Good Idea?
• Can the US “Out China” China?
• Morris Chang's Last Speech
• Distributed Engineering Management Best Practices with Justin Cormack

Some of these articles were published in 2020, so it’s satisfying to see high-quality but relatively old posts continue to do well. I’m also seeing a strong demand for translation-type posts of speeches or other types of primary source information to further “unlock” the Chinese tech world.

Our team will take a break from publishing in the next two weeks to reflect on the stats we just shared with you in this post, and the meaning behind them. We will share more of our future plans in our first post of 2022. Until then, happy holidays, happy New Year, and thank you for your ongoing support!