By Julian Dierkes
It was a big year for the blog because we moved from the original home at the Univ of British Columbia to our own domain as I moved from UBC to the University of Mannheim.
This move has disrupted traffic flows somewhat as search engines make the adjustment to the new location because we have not wanted to take down the old site entirely since there will be many readers who will have been used to the old URL. Judging by the analytics, it seem that traffic really started picking up to the new URLs late in the Fall to reach levels that are comparable to those before the move (but after the evil Twitter takeover that might me quit that platform)
As a reminder to readers, you can fine me on Mastodon and Bluesky where I regularly post, including posts about new blog posts. Mongolia Focus is also on LinkedIn and we send notifications about new posts out via a WhatsApp channel.
Posts
We published 33 posts in the past year, Marissa and I wrote the majority of them, but this also included 10 guest posts. These posts brought us up to 892 posts in total since we started publishing in the summer of 2021. Extrapolation would point to 2027 with its presidential election as the year that we pass the 1,000-post milestone, since we are typically more active during election years.
Among the posts have been some “service posts” like our bios of Zandanshatar cabinet members. Marissa also wrote a really handy glossary of the MPP that helped us (and hopefully readers) analyze several (near)crises of government.
In the long run, I imagine that my attempts to understand changing V-Dem scores on academic freedom may prove to be the most significant to inform future analyses (mine, but hopefully also others). V-Dem also spurred me to write on self-censorship which also seems like it is a lasting feature of Mongolian democracy, if difficult to grasp empirically. Prior to these posts I also published a somewhat frustrated observation about all the things that I have seen repeating in Mongolian politics over the past 20 years without substantive change. I also could not help myself but note the display of toxic masculinity in much of Mongolian political imagery.
The post I probably enjoyed writing most was my musings about the origin of wooden fences.
You know those ubiquitous wooden board fences in urban areas of #Mongolia, right? How can they be so common?
mongoliafocus.com/2025/08/orig…— Mongolia Focus (@mongoliafocus.bsky.social) August 25, 2025 at 3:43 PM
Marissa also followed this up with her thoughts on egg cartons. Of course, these posts are more musings than analyses, but our position as regular, but intermittent visitors to Mongolia allows us to share some such observations on occasion. In this vein, a Spring visit also allowed me to continue my observations of changes in Ulaanbaatar and in the countryside.
Of course, analyses of the shift from PM Oyun-Erdene to Zandanshatar and subsequent permutations were the focus of a plurality of our posts.
Oh, and no LLM models have been used in the writing of any of my posts, neither for content nor for style!
Readership
Assessing readership has been complicated somewhat by the migration of Google Analytics to a new format, a migration that I have not – honestly – fully understood. For my lack of understanding, the pre-migration and post-migration numbers are not added up, so everything has gone a little wonky.
New Analytics
Using the system that will supply analytics going forward (in operation since Apr 2025), I see a total of 14,000 pageviews (as of Dec 30 2025).
The root page is always the most visited, followed this past year by:
- Zandanshatar cabinet (235)
- Helsinki Mongolian democracy photo exhibit (191)
- PM Zandanshatar (181)
- Oyun-Erdene Era (175)
- Mongolia Economic Forum (172).
What is very noticeable in this listing is that some of our older posts that have always received strong readership are not included which is probably due to the fact that they are enjoying a zombie existence on the UBC site.
Top ten origin countries of readers (well, there IP address anyway, I imagine) were:
- China (60%)
- U.S. (14.7%)
- Singapore (14.1%)
- Mongolia (8%)
- Germany (2.6%)
- Canada (2.3%)
- UK (2.1%)
- Australia (1.2%)
- Japan (1.1%)
- Netherlands (1%)
There are some significant changes from previous statistics in this. The share of pageviews from China is huge. As recently as 2022, this was 4%! Singapore has never featured in this listing before. I cannot help but wonder whether the site migration and analytics shift does not have something to do with this. Seems more plausible to me than a real shift in readership.
Old Analytics
The older tracking logged over 20,000 pageviews. That implies a total of over 34,000 pageviews which is in line with previous, non-election years.
In the most visited pages, some of our “evergreen” posts are making a stronger appearance here:
- Fascist symbolism in Mongolia (Me and Niels Hegewisch: 2020)
- Popularity of Russian (Bulgan: 2016)
- Discovery of Oyu Tolgoi (Byambajav: 2016)
- Nalaikh Mining Education Centre (Me and Mendee: 2018)
- Mongolia Scorecard (living listing)
The top ten origin countries show some surprising similarities and differences to those noted by the new system:
- China (61.7%)
- Singapore (24%)
- U.S. (10.3%)
- Mongolia (5%)
- Hong Kong (4.1%)
- Canada (3%)
- Germany (1.6%)
- UK (1.3%)
- Australia (1.1%)
- Vietnam (1.1%)
