As 2017 ends, all of us at InsidePrivacy are grateful for the attention and engagement of our readers.  This has been an excellent year for our blog, and we’d like to share with you some information about InsidePrivacy and its readers.

First, there are more of you than ever — in fact, an 11% year-over-year increase in unique visitors.  We expected some uptick after the American Bar Association named us one of the top 100 law blogs about a year ago, but the good news is that this has been a sustainable increase in our audience rather than a spike.

Second, we now have a good sense of the issues that interest you.  Not surprisingly, our most popular posts in this year leading up to the effective date of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have been our posts on preparation for the GDPR.  In particular, our post on the Article 29 Working Party’s opinions on the meaning of the GDPR’s terms, like this one, have been our most popular, both in direct traffic and search queries.  In addition, you are very interested in China — and, in particular, the regulations that are now being crafted under China’s new cybersecurity law.  Big fines have been interesting to you as well, with our blog on Italy’s record fine drawing a large audience.  Stateside, new legislative efforts by the states, such as Washington’s new biometric identification law, have been particularly popular.  Our more analytical articles, such as Lindsey Tonsager’s excellent post on whether the FTC should consider IP addresses to constitute “personal information,” continue to be popular — Lindsey’s post is still one of our most searched blog posts, even more than a year after its publication.

Third, we also now know that you are a diverse group.  Our top 10 countries demonstrate the global diversity of our readership — in order, United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, India, Belgium, Japan, China, Netherlands and Hong Kong.  Our top 20 list includes the Republic of Korea, Singapore and Australia.

For 2018, we’ll be using what we’ve learned about your preferences to dive more deeply into the areas that interest you.  But we’d like to rely on more than just analytics in crafting our goals for the coming year.  Please let us know if there are particular areas in privacy and cybersecurity that pique your interest, and areas where you think we can do better.  In addition, if there are additional venues that you think deserve more attention from us — Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, others — please let us know.  You can always reach our team by dropping me a note at kwimmer@cov.com.

Most importantly, best wishes for a new year, and thank you for reading InsidePrivacy.  We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we like writing it.