2025, the stats

 

I did one of these last year, on the exact same date, in fact. It's a nice numbers-driven look at the performance of the blog in the past year. It was inspired by Diamond Jesters, who evaluated his blog in the same way last year.

 

I know I just did a year-end review a week ago, but that was a lot of words and this involves waaaaaaaay less picture-taking. I need more breathers these days.

 

So let's look at the numbers:

 

Blog overview: I am in my 18th year of running this blog. I also run the 1993 Upper Deck blog (very casually, if I may add). This is my 5,876th post on NOC. If I continue to write even an average number of posts I will hit post 6,000 this year.

 

Team-set goals: I continue to collect the Dodgers base sets for the major sets that come out. I'm less enthusiastic about stuff like Chrome but I will eventually get those team sets done, too. As for inserts and parallels and online issues, I only add what appeals to me, and I'm doing it less and less frequently.

 

I have not budged from having every major Dodgers team set completed from 1956-present, but in the past year I did make some progress on early '50s Dodgers sets. I hope to do more of that in the coming year.

  

 

Completed sets: In 2024, I completed 14 sets, which was my all-time record. I finished eight in 2025, which I'll take. A couple of other sets are almost finished and I hope to wrap them up in the first weeks of 2026.

 

Meanwhile I've already completed two sets in 2026! You just saw one, the 1977 Topps Cloth Stickers set. But before that I finished the 2024 Topps Chrome tennis set. The above two cards were the last ones I needed. I received pretty much the entire set from Johnny's Trading Spot last year but there were a bunch of rookies left out, so I gathered those when I could. 

 

Milestones: I wrote my 20th magazine article for Beckett in 2025. Also I'm looking forward to my 32,000th Dodger card in 2026. I'm less than 75 cards away.

 

OTHER BLOG STATS

 

Number of posts: I wrote 212 posts for NOC in 2025, which is the lowest for a 12-month period and is the second straight year in which I set a low. This year's low is 25 posts under last year's and I predicted it in last year's stats post. I don't necessarily see a new low in 2026 but I'm not expecting to be suddenly prolific again either.

 

Month with the most posts: No month stood out. In fact, six months featured 19 posts, which was the high out of any month.

 

Top-five most viewed posts: Welp, this category is pointless thanks to the AI bots that emerged at the end of August. All of my highest "viewed" posts were enabled by robots and occurred in a one-week period in mid-September. So there's no point in reviewing those.

 

 

Top viewed post that I can't determine was inflated by AI: 

 

That was on May 19 when I wrote about pulling this pink sparkle refractor Shohei Ohtani from a box of 2025 Heritage. It received 1,252 views, which is still more than any post in 2024. In fact the top five "non-AI" viewed posts are all more than any post in 2024, so maybe the bot influence lasted all year.

 

Most commented-on posts:

 

1. Oct. 28: 36 comments, "Finished and Finished". When I completed the 1969 Topps set.

2. Sept. 13: 28 comments, "At seventeen". My blog anniversary post for the year.
3. Nov. 2: 27 comments, "An embarrassment of riches". The post about the Dodgers winning the 2025 World Series
4. Aug. 31: 26 comments, "Just me and the robots out here". About the AI infestation on the blog

5. July 16: 24 comments. "Milestone stuff". My birthday

 

Commenting actually was better than ever in the past year, which does not jive with how I felt in the past year. But that's probably related to not being able to rely on views anymore. Commenting is all I have to go on. So why aren't you commenting? (I know, I know, Google won't let you. That does suck).

 

STATE OF THE BLOG, STATS, GRAPHICS

 

Ha, this will be comical.

 

A look at views for the past year with a few outrageous spikes. For comparison, here is last year's yearly graph:

 

Note that the y-axis went up to 25 thousand in 2024 and in 2025 it's at 150 thousand. There is no way I picked up 125 thousand viewers in the last year.

 

 

The viewing timeline for the life of the blog. Ha. The needle malfunctioned at the end there.

 

Followers: 466. I picked up six in 2025.

 

Total page views as of this writing: 9,817,614. That's 4 million more than last year. I probably should just remove that function from the sidebar.

 

MY COLLECTION STATS

 

(From TCDB)

 

Total number of cards: 118,163 (an increase of about 7,000 cards. This is even with starting to downsize, but that began only in the last quarter of the year).

Cards from 2025 sets: 1,491 (that is down from the 2024 total at this time last year. Meanwhile 2024 has risen to fifth place all-time for me. The only years ahead of it are junk wax years!!)
Dodgers cards: 31,927 (but there are two unopened envelopes sitting next to me)

Autographed cards: 316 (up 28 from last year and that doesn't include any TTM examples I have)
Graded cards: 9

Relic cards: 341, which is 31 more than last year -- and I almost never seek them out.

 

So I'd say the blog was pretty healthy in the last year but not as healthy as the numbers say!

 

As always, thanks for reading.