The end of the year is a great time to look back at everything we’ve done and congratulate ourselves for making such a fantastic website. Come along on our journey!
Top 10 Most Popular 2012 Posts
Here are the most popular written-in-2012 posts of 2012, according to all the important numbers, specifically “page views” and “unique visitors.”
1. The Autostraddle Hot 100 2012: The Hottest Queerest Women in All The Land, assembled by Riese and Intern Grace. May 25, 2012.
In 2009, we listed 100 things that are hot, like volcanoes. In 2010, we invited you to submit photos of yourselves if you were super-hot, in 2011 we invited you to submit photos of other hot lezzers in your life and this year we decided to really hit the traffic jackpot by inviting you to vote on the top 100 queer-identified woman-identified humans on the internet. I think this was successful because everybody likes looking at photographs, lists, voting for assorted celebrities and consequently arguing about the resulting lists of photographs of assorted celebrities. However, tallying the votes was slow water torture.
2. Epic Gallery: 150 Years of Lesbians And Other Lady-Loving Ladies, by Riese. September 22, 2012.
This was my massive pet project of the year and although I thought it’d be appreciated and enjoyed by a significant number of people, I didn’t think it was going to blow up the entire internet. Because it took 4-5 months to assemble, I’d become so numb to looking at these images by the time I went up that I’d forgotten how magical each discovery had seemed at the time.
3. Jillian Michaels and Heidi Rhoades Become Two Mommies With Two Kiddies, by Riese. May 23, 2012.
I’m unsure why the Google Goddesses decided to bless us with prominent positioning in the Jillian Michaels Is Gay? search engine game, but they have — our first post about her remains magically popular despite being not all that interesting, and this one also performed well. The convergence of the Hot 100 and Jillian Michaels Doing A Thing led to an enormous stats boost in May.
4. 50 Adorable Lesbian Couples Having Adorable Lesbian Weddings, by Carolyn. June 15, 2012
Tabitha and Cynthia by Beaux Arts Photographie
“Would it be weird if I made a totally swf gallery of all the adorable lesbian wedding photos I find on the way to the smut?” Carolyn asked. I endorsed the idea immediately, obviously, I mean have you ever been to So You’re Engayged? It’s the cutest website on the internet. It was also a great way to showcase lesbian-friendly wedding photographers. Like Robin Roemer, etc.
5. Texting Your Ex-Girlfriend In Five Easy Steps, by Lizz. May 22, 2012.
Lizz manages to get at least one solid list post out of every girl she dates, it’s awesome, she’s like a lesbian Carrie Bradshaw for the SEO Era. This one was definitely her best work because it made me LOL fifty times. It’s always nice when a post makes the list for its writing rather than for its topic or its large photographs of girls! This one was so popular that somebody basically repackaged the whole post and published it in an Australian newspaper — online AND in print. Despite the writer attempting to frame the thing as if she’d interviewed Lizz on this topic, or something (obviously she hadn’t), she didn’t even link to us, we only knew about it ’cause an intrepid reader saw it and alerted us. Look!
6. 50 Queer Women With Outrageously Good Hair, assembled by Lizz & Riese. March 26, 2012.
Lizz proposed this and then, suffering from Extreme Gallery Creation Exhaustion, entrusted me to finish it up, which’s basically par for the course anyhow as I have Really Serious Gallery Criteria which are often difficult to explain to anybody less crazy than me. Lizz asked us all to brainstorm who to include, which turned out to be a great way to find out which celebrities have bad hair by proposing their inclusion and getting shot down. Lizz is a supreme expert on all these things.
7. 15 Ways to Spot a Lesbian, According To Some Really Old Medical Journals, by Riese/Tinkerbell. June 17, 2012.
I got a book called Lesbian Lists from the library and used one of their lists to make this list. It took approximately fifteen minutes and look, it was the seventh most popular post of the year! GAH!
8. The 21 Most Lesbianish Cities in the US: The Autostraddle Guide, by Riese. January 24, 2012.
CAT PEREZ VIA LESBIANSINSF.TUMBLR.COM
The annual lists put out by The Advocate and other magazines and websites of the most gay-friendly places to live have always really annoyed me. They’re perpetually wrong, use bizarre metrics, forget women exist and appear to have been constructed by straight people. So I made my own! Obviously y’all had heaps of feelings about it and thus the Queer Girl City Guides were born. We’ve already done guides for about 40 major cities around the world! Jezebel cross-posted the list and somehow this resulted in the internet finding them responsible for any findings they disagreed with. I put “the team” as the author even though it was just me. Maybe ’cause it seemed ridiculous that one person would’ve done all that and I didn’t want you to know the depths of my ridiculousness.
9. The Real L Word’s Nikki & Jill: The Autostraddle Interview, by Jess. May 31, 2012
Actually we owe a great deal of this post’s success to Nikki and Jill, who directed pretty much everybody who’d ever heard of them to read the interview — we had the exclusive on the gender of their then-unborn baby, SO. Nikki and Jill are really great, you guys, and have always been big supporters of Autostraddle who are eager to throw as much traffic our way as possible. Jess R got Really Busy this year so this was one of our only Jess Celebrity Interviews in 2012, which’s super-sad. You guys should bother her on formspring with requests for who she should interview.
10. My Little Pony: Lesbianism is Magic, by Rose. May 30, 2012
VIA: MARIKAEFER.DEVIANTART.COM
Not gonna lie, when Rose pitched this I was like, what the living fuck are you talking about? Rachel, Laneia and I didn’t know who of us would be best-qualified to take a first look at Rose’s draft as we were all equally unfamiliar with the material. Luckily Rose fact-checks not only her own articles but often the entire internet, so we could trust that she had her little ponies in a row. This post was linked by a site called “Equestria Daily” and Rose was like, “Oh my God, I got linked on EQD! You have no idea how big a deal this is if you’re a pony fan, lol.” This was accurate. I had absolutely no idea! I feel like the nature of this website often leads to an unintentional (and frustrating) #hivemind and therefore I’m always extra excited when somebody steps forward offering to show us a world they’re intimately familiar with that we’ve never seen. This world turned out to be a pretty fascinating one.
NEXT: The Most Popular Older Posts of 2012, Most-Commented-Upon Posts & More!
Pages: 1 2 3See entire article on one page
The ‘Epic Gallery: 150 years of Lesbians…’ post is truly brilliant and certainly one of my favourite pieces that I read (from any publication – online or offline) at any point during 2012.
On a separate note; as a massive SEO nerd this post makes me so happy! I would be particularly interested to see what people search for within Autostraddle internally – ie. what the regular readers and members search for within the site, rather than the general interweb arriving here trying to find out who’s gay.
Also an SEO nerd, also totally into this post.
Mmm analytics porn.
SEO nerds unite! Lemme at that link juice!
I wonder how high the bounce rate is for most of those search queries? Is what I was thinking reading that, love me some analytics stats!
That is amazing re: Lizz’s Australian newsprint fame. I did not know this kind of plagiarism was a thing and will be paying much closer attention to my local rags from now on.
Everyone I have a conversation with about T Swift I send to that article Riese wrote about how horrible she is in every way, so I am très happy to see it is still heavily trafficked.
I feel like I must have been MIA for most of 2012, as I can’t remember many of these posts that are featured in all these top lists. Clearly I have some catching up to do.
Also, I’m with JC on telling everyone ever to read the Taylor Swift article. Also the comments. I always tell them the comments add to the brilliance of the commentary Riese brings.
‘150 years of lesbians …’ was absolutely wonderful. Definitely down as one of my favourite ever Autostraddle posts. Heartwarming kinda stuff. Also, I know that one of my ex-lecturers, whom I was totally smitten with, would love it. She’s gay. She’s a history lecturer. She likes pictures. What is there not to love?
I really appreciated ‘Texting your ex-girlfriend’ too – all for comedic value. Enjoyed recommending it to a friend who really needed the advice as well.
a straight, male friend of mine posted that taylor swift article on facebook recently, because he thought it was awesome probs. I was like “WHEEEEE!”
Seriously, I love that article – some of the comments are wacky, but the article perfectly explains my discomfort with Taylor Swift, her songs and all that she represents.
Riese, I reread that T Swift article, and I still love you for it.
I’m still really sad at where the comments went on “Public Sex is My Radical Sex;” I really liked that article and people were very harsh.
Just re-read it and the comments. The article was definitely interesting – I still have mixed feelings about it. But, the opportunity to discuss it in a meaningful way quickly fell apart. It was unfortunate that people weren’t able to agree or disagree with differing parts of the article without someone with an opposing view calling them either insensitive or too sensitive.
The events around that article is an outlier – AS comments/commenters are generally awesome.
Yeah, I find that 9 times out of 10 when the comments go to hell, it’s usually because of jerks from another site who flood the article, not because of our regular commenters. Our regular commenters are awesome!
One thing that made me happy about my ponies post is it’s a rare case where we got flooded with outside commenters (because it got linked on several MLP fansites, including the most popular one, Equestria Daily) but the commenting quality was still awesome. Probably because most of them were bronies who were like “Hey, someone said something nice about us for once and actually did their research instead of resorting to stereotypes!”
Er, I shouldn’t have said “rare” – obviously, most outside commenters are great and add to the site. But it seems like when we get a huge invasion like that, it’s usually for controversy’s sake? Maybe that’s just me.
Evan Rachel Wood Bisexual 4eva.
[person]+[sexual orientation]
…Anyone else unable to see Evan Rachel Wood Bisexual’s orientation?
I must have linked the Taylor Swift rant a hundred times on Twitter this year.
It’s just a really good post, okay
oh man i actually just love going back to comment sections full of trolls and reading like 200 comments worth of hilarious editor-supplied additions to hateful comments. you’re all super amazing. keep up the dancing hotdogs.
and i think i just read the entire comment section on the taylor swift article. i get the impression that the editors of this lovely website have basically just given up on going anywhere near that. i feel like if autostraddle was a family christmas gathering where everyone is wearing cute sweaters and having intellectual discussions over the tofurkey, then that comment section is the drunk uncle that sits in the corner, yells out obnoxious shit, and hits on your girlfriend, and you’ve just all decided that if you ignore him, maybe he’ll shut up eventually.
“150 years of lesbians …’ was fantastic
Also, Evan Rachel Wood Bisexual
So I was reading the comments on one of these articles, and then the Infamous Fingernails Article was linked in a comment, and of course every time that link comes up I have to re-read it… is that just me?
Also, *shudder*
What is the link?
trust me you don’t want it
but anyway http://www.autostraddle.com/effing-dykes-what-lies-beneath-her-nails-68129/
Oh god you were right. That made me want to cry.
That easter egg roll is actually one of my favorite posts! Once in a while I’ll get really bored and look it up; it’s probably the funniest way to kill half an hour.
I know absolutely nothing about My Little Pony but I just read that article. And all of the comments. And now I’ve found it on Netflix. Y’all must have some kind of voodoo at work around here.
Nice retrospective. Witnessing (and occasionally commenting on) your journey for the past few years has been aces. And now, I will revisit some of the posts mentioned, starting with Laneia’s most-commented-on post; I recall thinking it was moving and charming, and it mentioned something about boats (?) that made me laugh.
[I wrote this while listening to Everypony’s gay for Braeburn, brought to me by Equestria Daily, via this, because why not. Boats.]
Yeah, this is immature and irrelevant as Taylor Swift herself but it gave me lols: “Never was this bunnyrabBITCHild persona more exploited than it was after the VMAs.” Sometimes even dyslexia can be fun.
I hope this site sticks around. One of a kind and my equivalent to a morning paper.
Wait a sec, did AS not invent, or at least popularise, the term Alternative Lifestyle Haircut?
So this has propogated throughout the internet and now people use it to return to the very cradle of ALH?
I feel like somehow this is very meta and cyclical and the world will soon be sucked into a vortex of asymmetrical queer coiffures.
it was first said during a gay pimp podcast episode starring me and carly – johnny was joking about how he could tell from our alternative lifestyle haircuts that we were lesbians (i had a different haircut then, obvs!) – and then we popularized it and now everybody uses it everywhere b/c we rule
I just really want “fisting” to be on this list next year.
Still makes me wince. But the folks at our hometown hospital say “Hi”!
But! Half the replies on http://www.autostraddle.com/there-must-be-at-least-five-ways-to-text-your-ex-girlfriend-138626/ are mental spam from bizarre randoms singing the praises of a myriad of witch-doctors who will get your ex back for you.
Do the spam comments count? Having said that, it was the most marvellous article, one that I should have re-read yesterday. Perhaps then I would not be suffering from this massive bout of message-outbox alco-shame. Le sigh.
well, it wasn’t listed on the “most commented” posts lists, just the most viewed.
And that’s why I should pay more attention to what I read. Cheers Riese.
Aw, the stuff about my writing in the summary of the ponies post was so nice! Thanks guys!
I was reliving the great comment wars of 2012 and I noticed that you referred to a certain troll named Trixie as “the great and powerful Trixie” and I just wanted to come back to the present and let you know that you won my heart/pants and all the things.
Wait, I don’t remember this, which comment war was this?
(But thanks! I’m glad people appreciate/understand my random MLP references!)
The Dirty Truth About Bisexuals
And I was slightly wrong, the troll’s username was Tricksie, so I spelled it wrong. Speaking of Trixie, do you do fanfic? And have you read Kindness’s Reward?
I read MLP fanfiction (since that’s the bulk of the focus of my article above) although I’m a bit behind right now. But I’ve never gotten that into writing it, at least not with ponies.
When I saw “evan rachel wood bisexual” I seriously almost lol’ed, but it’s 2 a.m. and I’m trying not to wake people up.
Evan Rachel Wood Bisexual 5ever
I remember those days fondly
Just reread the dirty truth about bisexuals.
Seriously. Genius.
I enjoyed this post so much!
Thanks for all of this great content :)
The femme article was great. And I just read Rose’s pony article. So strange, but SO WELL DONE. Another site with lower standards would have massacred topics like this.
I also love that AS can admit when things are ‘a disaster’ or a fucking shitstorm.
If the most googled stats were dependant on me Peanut butter cookies would be no.1. Cos i cannot tell you how often i’ve needed that recipe in an emergency.
I love everything Riese writes.
I think it’s weird that I really, really like all the lists and stats about Autostraddle. So this compilation is fantastic.