Happy New Year

I sat down to look at the TSK stats for 2011 in Google Analytics today, and it was jaw dropping. Before doing anything else, I want to thank all of you who come here an make it a site worth writing for and visiting. The growth we experienced here was remarkable.

Team Speed Kills debuted in April of 2008. In 2011, this site had 1.25 million visits and 1.77 million page views. Both of those are larger than the cumulative traffic from the beginning of the site to December 31, 2010. That is unbelievable. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The year 2011 was a special one around here, and we'll work to make 2012 even better. After the jump are some more stats for nerds (like me) who find such things interesting.

Top Ten Cities for Traffic: Atlanta, Birmingham, New York, Houston, Dallas, Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, Austin, Washington, Chicago.

Alabama is pretty well represented here, and welcome to the SEC, all you Texans out there. The top cities for the other SEC states were Nashville (12), Baton Rouge (13), Little Rock (18), Jackson (19), Columbia (20), Gainesville (22) and Louisville (50).

Top Five Posts in Page Views

Danny Sheridan and the Bag Man, John Bond and his tapes, a guide to the SEC for A&M fans, a Newton case update from last January, and a BCS standings update from November 20. My hunch as to the biggest traffic generators was correct: the Cam Newton investigation, SEC expansion, and the possibility of a rematch late in the season. The numbers don't lie.

The rest of the top 10 consists of more BCS news, more conference realignment news, and in at 10th the postgame dust up between James Franklin and Todd Grantham.

Top Search Terms

Three of the top five search terms are either (not provided) or a search for the site's name. While I'm glad we rank highly for the name of our site, you can skip the Google part and just type in it your browser's address bar.

The rest of the top ten in order were BCS rankings, Danny Sheridan, BCS rankings 2011, Missouri SEC, Harris Poll, SEC expansion, and Cam Newton investigation. The dominant storylines remain dominant here, and welcome to the party, Missouri.

Browser Share

Nerd alert time! The top browsers were Internet Explorer (36%), Firefox (20.7%), Safari (20.6%), Chrome (13.27%), and the Android browser (5%). Safari encompasses all versions of the browser whether desktop or on iOS. Opera came in seventh at 0.35%, and Netscape (?!?) came in ninth at 0.27%.

I have only the final eight months of 2010 in Analytics, but here's how the top five in share was last year: IE (42%), Firefox (26%), Safari (18%), Chrome (10%), and "Mozilla compatible agent" (1.64%). Netscape was sixth at 0.47%, and Opera was seventh at 0.35%. Android is not anywhere on the browser report but does show up fourth on the 2010 OS report, so I assume it was included in the "Mozilla compatible agent" group. Based on some cursory Googling, I determined that category includes a miscellany of mobile browsers, obscure desktop browsers, and possibly Opera users with edited user agent strings.

I warms my heart to see IE declining so. The sooner all versions before 9 are gone, the better.

Operating Systems

The top operating systems for 2011 were Windows (65%), Mac OS X (13%), iPhone (9%), Android (6%), iPad (4%), and Linux (0.78%). Blackberry clocked in eighth at 0.67%. Also appearing at under 1% (in descending order) were iPod Touch, Symbian, Windows Phone, PlayStation 3, Chrome OS, Google TV, Nintendo Wii, OS/2 (?!?), FreeBSD, and Danger Hiptop (hi, Sidekick users). You all use a wide variety of means to get to us, and bless your hearts all you who actually browse on your Wii consoles. I gave up on that long ago.

Here's how that compares to 2010: Windows (73%), Mac OS X (14%), iPhone (6%), Android (2%), iPad (1%), Blackberry (0.98%), iPod Touch (0.62%), and Linux (0.60%). It's still a Windows world, but you can clearly see that the eight percentage points it lost (plus the one that Mac OS X did) went to the iPhone, Android, and the iPad. In fact, iOS edged out Mac OS X 13.46% to 12.62% in 2011. In 2010 we saw all the same of the exotic OS's out there, though without OS/2 but with IRIX. If you were the IRIX user, please do leave a comment.

These browser and OS stats are interesting, but they only reflect the traffic this site gets and say nothing about the world as a whole.