Sugaring Off: Vermont Politics and History, Plain and Simple

One year ago, I published my first article, digging in to the July 1st Campaign Finance filings. Since then, Sugaring Off has published 39 posts covering everything from Town Meeting to the 2024 election to ancient Vermont history. We launched a podcast (that will hopefully come back soon!), and we stirred up a fair bit of discourse. I want to thank all of you, our loyal readers, for your continued support, feedback, and engagement, and I hope that you’ll stay tuned! Below are some ways that you can help Sugaring Off continue to grow in its second year, plus some stats for all my fellow nerds out there.

How you can help Sugaring Off grow:

1. ENGAGE with the content!
   • The easiest way to help Sugaring Off grow is to give us sweet, sweet, ENGAGEMENT. Liking, commenting, sharing, and reposting helps our content reach a wider audience and helps persuade the algorithm to push Sugaring Off into more peoples’ feeds.
2. Subscribe!
   • At the top of this webpage is a button that says “Subscribe.” If you click that button, you’ll be taken to a page where you can enter your email address to get posts delivered directly to your inbox. I won’t spam you, and I won’t sell your contact information to political campaigns, but it will help me grow the audience on WordPress and help you get Sugaring Off content without having to wait for the algorithm to serve it to you.
3. How do I put this tactfully…
   • To quote the great John Mulaney, “Give us some money!” Hosting a website (and a podcast) isn’t free. I’ll never put any of my content behind a paywall, but if you enjoy my content and can spare a few bucks to help us keep the lights on, I’d greatly appreciate it. You can make a contribution here: https://ko-fi.com/sugaringoff.

Stats for Nerds

Sugaring Off has been viewed 6,077 times by 2,726 visitors.

Our most-viewed article was State House Shakeup, about changes in Democratic leadership following the 2024 election. Published in January of this year, this piece stirred up quite a bit of social media discourse (which we always love to see). Our least viewed article was the Better Know a Battleground entry for Caledonia-1. Not much love for the good people of Barnet, Ryegate, and Waterford, sad!

People access Sugaring Off from a multitude of platforms, the most popular of which is still Twitter (futurely X), with 911 referrals. 502 referrals came from Instagram. 235 come directly from search engines, with the most popular being Google, followed by Bing, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, and Yahoo. 176 referrals came from links on the Vermont Political Observer, written by John Walters, the Dean of the VTPoli Blogosphere. Thank you for the plugs, John! 117 referrals came through WordPress, the platform I use to host this site. 112 referrals came from Facebook. 18 referrals came from a forum called talkelections.org. 12 referrals came from the SubStack of friend of the page and sometime-contributor David Delaney. Nine referrals came from would-be Twitter replacement BLUESKY. Finally, seven great patriots who subscribe to Sugaring Off via email clicked the link and opened the articles directly. A variety of other sources had just one or two referrals.

We have a diverse international audience! (or people who use diverse VPNs). 5,690 of our views came from the United States. However, we’ve also had between 25 and 130 viewers from France, Ireland, Canada, Germany, India, and the UK. We’ve also had visitors from Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands, China, Mexico, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Japan, South Korea, Italy, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Turkey, Singapore, Serbia, Romania, Norway, Israel, Honduras, Finland, Bangladesh, Australia, and Austria. If you are an international reader, please get in touch! I’d love to hear how you found us.

Our top ten cities/municipalities (as far as the WordPress geolocator can say), are Burlington, New York City, Manchester, Baltimore, Montpelier, Keene, Bennington, Rochester, and Hartford. Among the places with only one visitor are MAHWAH, Tulsa, Fort Myers, Cincinnati, Pierre, Battle Creek, Murfreesboro, Hannibal, and Zurich.

66% of you access Sugaring Off on mobile. 38% read on desktop, and a mighty one percent read on tablet. Chrome is the most popular browser, followed by Safari, “Other,” Firefox, Opera, and Edge. The most popular operating system among Sugaring Off readers is the iPhone, followed by Windows, Mac, Android, LINUX, Chrome, “Other,” iPad, and Android Tablet.

And that’s a wrap on Year One of Sugaring Off! Drop a comment, a reply, or shoot me an email to let me know what you’d like to see this year! Thank you all again for your continued readership and support, I really appreciate it! – Matthew