Who Loves 12MC?

Who loves the Twelve Mile Circle website the most? Anguilla, apparently.

I’ve tracked 12MC usage statistics for nearly five years, yet I hadn’t taken the next logical step by correlating this to per capita totals. Curiosity got the best of me and I created a simple spreadsheet comparing numbers of 12MC visitors by nations/dependent territories to their population. Mentally I would have guessed that the United States would have generated the greatest 12MC per capita visitor ratio. It’s an intuitive choice because I focus a large percentage of my website content on U.S. geo-oddities. I receive hundreds of U.S. visitors every day as a result.

Internationally, 12MC has a robust following in Canada and the United Kingdom, with Australia and New Zealand to a lesser degree. They’re all English-speaking countries. That makes sense. They would be my next set of logical choices. I figured that they would round-out the top tier given the number of visitors each sends to the site even while taking their sizable populations into account. Remarkably, other places seem to love 12MC more than these nations at least on a per capita basis.

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The Surprising Result

That brings me to Anguilla, a British overseas territory located in the Caribbean (map). Recent population projections estimate that only about 15,000 people live on Anguilla so it wouldn’t take a lot of clicks to influence my statistics. Still, it’s not just one or two visits to the website. It’s no anomaly. I receive a regular, steady stream from Anguilla; not every day but once every few days. It works out to something like 1 Anguilla visitor to 12MC for every 270 residents.

I’ve never featured Anguilla in an article directly. I’ve also never set foot on Anguilla although I’ve seen it from a distance. I took this photograph from the French town of Grand Case on neighboring Saint-Martin last year. Notice how Anguilla appears clearly across the channel

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So why do I get this traffic?

I suspect it’s due to tourists who are staying on Anguilla that are planning to cross the channel by ferry to spend a little time on Saint-Martin / Sint Maarten. I featured a number of pages during and immediately after my visit (e.g., Saint Martin Borders and Boundaries and Saint Martin Observations). The web logs seem to confirm this theory. My coverage of Saint Martin seems to have created a nice little statistical clustering causing Anguilla to be the most likely place to send a visitor to 12MC, at least per capita.

Speaking of Saint-Martin / Sint Maarten, this bifurcated island comes in second place and probably for a very similar reason. I had to make some assumptions in order to to calculate this. All of the traffic gets dumped into a generic “Netherlands Antilles” bucket.

Netherlands Antilles no longer exists, as we know, and even when it did it didn’t include the French oversees collectivity of Saint-Martin. Nonetheless that’s how I saw it recorded after I deliberately pinged 12MC from Grand Case, clearly on the French side of the border. I guess it must have something to do with the way Internet traffic leaves the island by undersea cable. I combined the populations of various components of the old Netherlands Antilles, added Saint-Martin, prorated, and came to the conclusion that the island captured second place.

Caribbean nations and dependencies send an inordinate amount of traffic to the Twelve Mile Circle. Let’s set those aside however and see what other surprises lurk.

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So What Else?

The United States — which I figured would be in first place effortlessly — didn’t appear in the per capita rankings until sixth place. Even Saint Pierre and Miquelon beat it. Well, that one I believe is a true anomaly. It all comes down to a single article I published in the early days of the blog.

Still, more readers per capita came from Iceland than Australia? And from Brunei than Ireland? And from New Zealand than Canada and (by far!) the United Kingdom?

Some of the per capita results are due to small nations with minuscule populations. Those are interesting side-shows with dubious statistical merit other than some residual entertainment value. However many are not. My biggest surprises were seeing New Zealand so high on the list and the UK much further down on the list.

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Top Tier

I think I’ll take a look at the individual U.S. states and see if my conventional wisdom is off-target there too. Meanwhile, here is the Top 25 per capita 12MC visitor list:

1. Anguilla
2. Saint Martin/Sint Maarten
3. Dominica
4. Saint Pierre and Miquelon
5. British Virgin Islands
6. United States
7. New Zealand
8. Canada
9. Iceland
10. Saint Kitts and Nevis
11. Bermuda
12. United States Virgin Islands
13. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
14. Saint Lucia
15. Australia
16. Antigua and Barbuda
17. Brunei
18. Cayman Islands
19. Barbados
20. Guernsey
21. Ireland
22. Isle of Man
23. United Kingdom
24. Bahamas
25. Turks and Caicos Islands