You’ll learn why so many visitors of this website come from the small town of Coffeyville in Kansas, USA, and that the largest age group of visitors is quite young.
My intention of starting this website was in answer to “The Brutal Truth: Nobody Cares About Your Photography“. Despite the idea’s widespread popularity at the time, I had my doubts.
I was convinced that my photos — taken with a 50-year-old classic lens like the Raynox 135mm f2.8, which I bought at a flea market for 10 Euro and adapted it to a cheap 400-Euro modern mirrorless camera, the Sony a6000 — were better than most of the photographs of people I was seeing that were taken with expensive, modern 1,000-Euro lenses on expensive 2,000-Euro cameras like the Sony a7iii.
So, what to do to fight the brutal truth that nobody cares about my photography?
Four years ago, I created this website and started to post about classic camera lenses. It is a private and totally non-commercial project. A side goal at that time was to provide a playground for search engine optimization (SEO) and to reach people from more than 100 countries through organic traffic. But the main goal was to fight ‘the brutal truth‘ idea as mentioned above.
I decided to aim for informative blog posts about using inexpensive classic camera lenses on modern mirrorless cameras. My first experience on this topic was using old Photo Porst M42 mount and Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm C/Y mount lenses from my analog film era adapted to my Sony a6000 camera. I achieved surprisingly positive results regarding image quality, price/performance ratio and bokeh.
Being a history buff myself, and in order to differentiate my blog from other websites about classic lenses, I decided to also include information about historical events occuring at the same time as the introduction of whatever classic lens was the subject of each post.
In my opinion, a look at the Google Analytics traffic statistics reveals some interesting facts about the people interested in classic camera lenses.
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How much Internet traffic does this website get?
According to Google Analytics 21,508 users visited this website in the first four years, where a user is defined as a unique visitor who initiated one or more sessions on the website. The web pages were viewed 41,072 times, and visitors spent an average of nearly two minutes on the site.
.Let’s dive deeper into Google Analytics’ statistics to find out what kind of people are interested in classic camera lenses.
Fun fact #1: Friends of classic camera lenses are found world wide, with the exception of several countries in Africa
To date, this website has received visitors from these 154 countries and territories with own Internet Top-Level Domains (in the order of decreasing frequency): United States, Germany, Indonesia, United Kingdom, China, Canada, Italy, France, Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia, Spain, Poland, Switzerland, Thailand, Japan, Singapore, Finland, India, Sweden, Czechia, Belgium, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Malaysia, Philippines, Norway, Russia, Vietnam, South Korea, Ireland, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Denmark, Brazil, Portugal, Taiwan, Argentina, Iran, Mexico, Pakistan, Ukraine, Serbia, Slovakia, Israel, Slovenia, Chile, Croatia, New Zealand, Latvia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Lithuania, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, Luxembourg, Iceland, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Brunei, Belarus, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Algeria, Estonia, Egypt, Morocco, North Macedonia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Macao, Zimbabwe, Bahrain, Ivory Coast, Dominican Republic, Madagascar, Martinique, Greenland, Jersey, Panama, Puerto Rico, Georgia, El Salvador, Kuwait, Uruguay, Cuba, Cambodia, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Namibia, Paraguay, Mongolia, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Oman, Guatemala, Nigeria, Iraq, Kenya, Mauritius, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Bolivia, Syria, Tunisia, Guam, Guernsey, Malta, Uzbekistan, Isle of Man, Montenegro, Jordan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Malawi, Bahamas, Kosovo, Réunion, New Caledonia, Haiti, Senegal, Moldova, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Andorra, Uganda, Ghana, Armenia, Jamaica, French Polynesia, Aruba, Liechtenstein, Honduras, Laos, Benin, Antigua & Barbuda, Seychelles, Barbados, Tonga, Papua New Guinea, St. Pierre & Miquelon, Gambia and Afghanistan. After the 4th anniversary: Nicaragua, Bhutan, Zambia, Cayman Islands, Albania, Belize, Kuweit and Palestine.
Subtracting the 19 non-sovereign territories with own Internet top-level domains (Aruba: .aw, Cayman Islands: .ky, Faroe Islands: .fo, French Polynesia: .pf, Guam: .gu, Guernsey: .gg, Greenland: .gl, Hong Kong: .hk, Isle of Man: .im, Jersey: .je, Kosovo: .xk, Macau: .mo, Martinique: .mq, New Caledonia: .nc, Puerto Rico: .pr, Réunion: .re, St. Pierre & Miquelon: .pm, Taiwan: .tw, Palestine: .ps), people from 135 sovereign countries and members of the UN have visited this website. As of today, the UN lists 193 sovereign countries as members.
People from 58 sovereign countries have never visited this website, but I assume that people in some countries such as South Sudan and Libya will not visit this website because they are likely to have other problems than learning about classical lenses.
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Fun fact #2: The visitors of this website are mainly male (expected) and quite young (not expected)
I didn’t expect to find that younger people (between 25 and 34 years old) would be the largest age group of visitors. My suggested explanation for this is that this age group might be more experimental compared to older age groups, and the excellent price/performance ratio of classic camera lenses might appeal more to them since they haven’t usually settled on higher salaries at that age.
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Fun fact #3: Visitors to this website are likely Value Shoppers, Home & Garden/Do-It-Yourselfers and Outdoor Enthusiasts
The visitors of this website fall most likely into the categories of “Shoppers/Value Shoppers”, “Lifestyle & Hobbies/Shutterbugs”, “Home & Garden/Do-It-Yourselfers”, and “Lifestyle & Hobbies/Outdoor Enthusiasts”. Do-it-yourselfer and outdoor enthusiast matches me 100%.
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Fun fact #4: If you are female and reading this, you are most likely from Indonesia
As we have already learned, approx. every sixth visitor to this website is female. Taking a closer look at where these female visitors are from, Indonesia is in first place, having more than twice as many as Germany in second place.
If you have an explanation for this, please contact me via e-mail or leave a comment below. The only things I can think of are: maybe Indonesia is full of used Japanese classic lenses; even if only a small percentage of Indonesians are shutterbugs, with such a large population of 276 million it would calculate into many individuals; maybe they are cost-sensitive and are living in a country full of beautiful photographic motifs.
A Google ID login or google cookies are not used in China, so Chinese visitors are not represented in following demographic statistics of Google Analytics.
Top-15 Gender/Country visitor groups
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Fun fact #5: This website is still waiting for the first visitor from Bhutan…
I like happy visitors and Bhutan is the only country in the world where happiness is enshrined in the country’s constitution. I wonder why there are no visitors from Bhutan, as visitors from Nepal to this website are quite regular. My assumption was that there must be no interest in classical lenses in Bhutan, and therefore no Google searches related to classical lenses.
However, if I check the Google Search Console, I can see impressions from countries and territories where this website was displayed in Google’s search engine results (Impressions), but did not receive a click on the search result snippet (Clicks).
In many countries and territories, local search results from this website have been shown, but no one has clicked on the search result yet
18 April 2023 Update: About 8 weeks after the 4th anniversary, the first visitor from Bhutan came to this website and looked at the Afghan girl with green eyes and some other classic lenses pages:
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Fun fact #6: Where the heck is Coffeyville?
Let’s have a look to the top 20 cities whose users are visitors of this website:
Find the town of Coffeyville in Kansas, USA here on Google Maps:
https://www.google.de/
maps/Coffeyville
Why are there so many visitors from Coffeyville visiting this website? Someone has already looked into this. Here’s the explanation:
Why Am I Getting So Much Web Traffic From Coffeyville? [Solved]
Quote: Coffeyville just happens to be in a unique spot that’s not far from the geographic center of the lower 48 United States. When some location services can’t determine a visitor’s specific location within the United States, they drop an anchor right around the latitude/longitude midpoint of the country – in Coffeyville. 
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Fun fact #7: The territories and countries with the most visitors in relation to population size
The top 10 countries and territories according to the number of visitors in relation to the size of population are (in order of decreasing frequency):
- Iceland
- Luxembourg
- Hong Kong
- Switzerland
- Singapore
- Finland
- Brunei
- Norway
- Netherlands
- Sweden
This site seems to be attractive to Scandinavian photographers, with visitors from Denmark coming in a close second in the top 20 countries.
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Fun fact #8: The most visited pages of the website
To a high extent, the organic traffic to this website comes from Google Search queries, as well as backlinks from other websites of the classic lenses community. The following three posts have attracted the most visitors, presumably due to their useful technical information, interesting historical background information about the classic lenses under discussion, and an all-round entertaining good read:
Swirly Bokeh? The legendary Zeiss Biotar 58mm f2 vs. the Russian copy Helios 44M-4 58mm f2 lens
Lens Design Evolution: Gauss, Double Gauss, Planar, Biotar and Biometar
Olympia Sonnar Carl Zeiss 180mm f2.8 lens Made in West- vs East-Germany, which is better?
Fun fact #9: Most interesting pages for visitors from Southeast-Asia
But there are important regional differences about the specific webpages that visitors are interested in. Segmenting the traffic data in Google Analytics to look only at visitors from Southeast-Asia, the preferred pages have almost nothing to do with search keywords like “legendary Carl Zeiss lenses”, but rather on value lenses that are classic, such as Minolta, Canon, etc., and non-classic, such as the inexpensive modern Viltrox 85mm f1.8 lens.
Top-10 Page/Country visitor groups from Southeast-Asia
See for yourself with these photos from Munich’s Octoberfest shot with the modern Viltrox 85mm f1.8 lens on an APS-C camera, which seems to be alluring to Southeast-Asian photographers:
Octoberfest night images with Viltrox 85mm f1.8 lens on Sony a6000 APS-C camera
I hope these nine fun facts have shone some light on the structure of the classic camera lenses community.
Kind regards,
Chris
Epilogue: The – legendary – Carl Zeiss T* 4/600mm Tele-APO Tessar classic lens
Take a look at Markus’ incredible 4K video of the moon with the Leica 2.8/400 lens: