Every year, a little after New Years, I do a post about the previous year of Techdirt traffic and comments. You may notice that we skipped last year’s for 2024. 2025 was so crazy with everything happening, we just didn’t get around to it, and I kept saying I would and then I looked up and it was May and it just didn’t feel right to go back. But now we’re back, closing the books on 2025 in mid-January.

If you’d like to see the details from previous years, here they are: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.

As we’ve done for a few years now, we continue to run without Google Analytics, relying instead on JetPack and Plausible Analytics. And as we always note, all traffic numbers are somewhat unreliable, but they give us a general sense of how things are going (and JetPack & Plausible’s numbers mostly seem to match).

In 2025, our traffic was up noticeably from previous the previous year—around 29% more pageviews compared to 2024. Given that 2025 was the year American democracy started visibly buckling, and we made it clear we wouldn’t back down from covering it, that’s probably not surprising. With so much of our national media falling down on the job, it turns out people will show up when you’re one of the news orgs actually calling out what’s happening.

As is pretty typical, the vast majority of our traffic came from the US (around 75%), followed by the UK, Canada, Australia, India, Germany, and Finland. After that you have the Netherlands, France, Sweden, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, Norway, and Pakistan. The stats say we had… a grand total of three visitors from Antarctica last year. Stay warm, folks. We also had three visitors from Vatican City. Sounds like Pope Leo isn’t yet reading Techdirt, but there’s still time.

In 2025 we published 1,993 posts and garnered 39,750 comments. The post number is about average for us over the past few years. The comment numbers are down a bit, even as traffic was up, which is likely due to some anti-trolling/anti-spam measures we took last May when a few trolls (and spammers) got a bit out of control. We also wrote about 1.74 million words in 2025, our most since 2016.

It also appears to be an unstoppable trend that Techdirt’s posts only get longer and longer, reaching 871 words per post on average last year. The trend here is not subtle.

As for where our traffic comes from, I’m always proudest of the fact that more than half of our traffic is direct traffic, not referred from elsewhere, meaning that we have a loyal audience that comes to check out Techdirt unmediated by various algorithms.

In terms of traffic referrals, the largest single source was Reddit. Search engines (mainly Google) were also significant. After that our two biggest referrers were Bluesky and Fark (yes, Fark!). It’s nice to see Bluesky continuing to send tons of traffic, reminding us that it’s the only major social media site that doesn’t downgrade and suppress links. We also got significant traffic from Flipboard, Google News, Hacker News, and the NewsBreak app.

Much further down on the referrals, X, Substack, and LinkedIn all gave us roughly the equivalent amount of traffic to each other (less than 10% of what Bluesky and Fark sent us). Also… ChatGPT. It’s a little bit less than X/Substack/LinkedIn, but I’m guessing by next year it will surpass those. Wikipedia & Threads each sent about the same amount of traffic as ChatGPT did.

Down towards the bottom of the list there are random blogs, news sites, a few RSS readers, and also Mastodon. They’re not that big compared to the others, but they’re all still sending some visitors our way.

Our traffic now appears to be almost exactly evenly split between computers and mobile devices. Last year it was a 51%/49% split with the slight edge going to desktops. In terms of specific operating systems, iOS tops the overall list, followed by Windows. Then Android, Mac, and Linux. There’s a much smaller group of folks at the bottom of the list using Chromebooks.

Interestingly, our most popular day for traffic was Thursday (18% of views), and the best hour was 9:00 AM (7% of views).

Okay, onto the lists!

Top Ten Stories, by unique pageviews, on Techdirt for 2025:

1. A Coup Is In Progress In America
2. Trump Publishes Enemies List To White House Website, And It’s Just Devastating
3. Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)
4. Trump Promises To Abuse Take It Down Act For Censorship, Just As We Warned
5. Trump Makes It Very Clear They’re Going To Turn TikTok Into A Right Wing Propaganda Machine
6. ICE Arrested And Detained A US Citizen For Hours Because He Looked Mexican
7. Congress Moving Forward On Unconstitutional Take It Down Act
8. First Cracks Appear: Some Conservatives Admit We’re In A Constitutional Crisis
9. TikTok To Be Sold To Trump’s Right Wing Billionaire Buddies And Converted Into A Propaganda Mill
10. The “Debate Me Bro” Grift: How Trolls Weaponized The Marketplace Of Ideas

The pattern here is not exactly subtle. Seven of the top ten stories are about the ongoing collapse of constitutional governance. The TikTok stories are really the same story twice… and in some way are directly connected to the collapse of the United States. And the only entry that isn’t directly about authoritarianism is about how bad-faith actors exploit free speech norms — which, well, same theme wearing different clothes.

2025’s Top Ten Stories, by comment volume:

1. The U.S. Copyright Office’s Draft Report On AI Training Errs On Fair Use (360 comments)
2. A Coup Is In Progress In America (268 comments)
3. The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone (194 comments)
4. MAGA’s Sickening Hypocrisy: From ‘Save The Children’ To ‘Defund The Org That Actually Saves Children’ (188 comments)
5. History Will Not Treat Those Sleepwalking Through This Crisis Well (149 comments)
6. When It’s Not Just A Coup But A CFAA Violation Too (145 comments)
7. Musk Shows Us What Actual Government Censorship On Social Media Looks Like (145 comments)
8. Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt (144 comments)
9. SCOTUS: TikTok’s China Connection Is So Scary & Urgent, We Can Ban An Entire App. Biden Admin: Just Kidding, We Won’t Enforce It (142 comments)
10. Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt (142 comments)

The fact that we had two of the weekly comment roundups ending up on the most commented list, both of which were from last January, tells you how we had some trolls who took it upon themselves to wreck the comments, especially on those posts early last year. Also, as we point out nearly every year, the fact that the list of highest commented posts is almost entirely different from the list of most visited posts seems noteworthy.

Now, to the personal commenter leaderboards:

2025 Top Commenters, by comment volume:

1. Stephen T. Stone: 2563 comments
2. That One Guy: 1577 comments
3. MrWilson: 1131 comments
4. Thad: 719 comments
5. Strawb: 685 comments
6. ECA: 537 comments
7. Mamba: 478 comments
8. Arianity: 465 comments
9. Rocky: 388 comments
10. n00bdragon: 326 comments

Stephen T. Stone continues to dominate the comment leaderboard, though with fewer comments than in previous years, probably since there were fewer troll comments to respond to. It’s also nice to see some new names on the list this year.

Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the lightbulb icon

(Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the icon)

1. Stephen T. Stone: 340 comments (13.3%)
2. MrWilson: 257 comments (22.7%)
3. That One Guy: 255 comments (16.2%)
4. Thad: 131 comments (18.2%)
5. Strawb: 106 comments (15.5%)
6. Bloof: 74 comments (30.0%)
7. n00bdragon: 64 comments (19.6%)
8. Heart of Dawn: 60 comments (22.8%)
9. Mamba: 48 comments (10.0%)
10. Rocky: 43 comments (11.1%)

Some familiar names here, though nice to see MrWilson move up in the rankings. Also a shoutout to Bloof for having the highest percentage of comments getting the insightful icon.

Top 10 Funniest Commenters, based on how many times they got the laughing face icon

(Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the icon)

1. MrWilson: 49 comments (4.3%)
2. Stephen T. Stone: 28 comments (1.1%)
3. Strawb: 19 comments (2.8%)
4. Thad: 19 comments (2.6%)
5. That One Guy: 13 comments (0.8%)
6. Heart of Dawn: 8 comments (3.0%)
7. n00bdragon: 7 comments (2.1%)
8. JMT: 4 comments (2.9%)
9. Rico R.: 3 comments (17.6%)
10. Rocky: 3 comments (0.8%)

Interesting to see MrWilson take the top spot for funny this year. As always, it’s much harder to get the funny icon than the insightful one. Last year wasn’t a huge year for humor, not surprisingly. But looking at how few “funny” comments were needed to get on the top 10 list, seems like some of you could jump onto it next year with just a few more funny comments. Let’s get some gallows humor going. Also, shoutout to Rico R. for having a very high percentage of their comments getting the funny icon.

And, with that, the 2025 books are officially closed. 2026 is already a few weeks in and shows no signs of being any less exhausting (quite the opposite), so we’ll see you in the comments. Thanks to everyone who reads and debates, and especially to those of you who support our work here.