The end of a year is a time for reviewing the previous 12 months, and also time for the top 10 lists of everything from 2024 – and we’re no different at Pixalytics and so this is our annual post looking at our most read blogs of 2024.

Over the last year we’ve written 29,100 words in our blogs and the both the number of views and the numbers of visitors to the website has increased slightly over 2023. As usual, despite everything we write about what is happening in the remote sensing industry, our most popular blogs continue to be about how many satellites are orbiting the Earth!

Our most viewed blog of the year was

1. How many satellites are orbiting the Earth in 2023? This post accounted for 42% of the total blog views on the website this year.

Out of the remaining top ten read blogs, only the tenth most popular blog was written in 2024. The remaining titles in the top ten were written in previous years – although you might find the titles strangely familiar!

2. How many satellites orbiting the Earth in 2020?
3. How many satellites orbiting the Earth in 2019?
4. How many satellites are orbiting the Earth in 2014?
5. How many Earth observation satellites are orbiting in 2023?
6. How many satellites are orbiting the Earth in 2018?
7. What do colours mean in satellite imagery?
8. Differences Between Optical & Radar Satellite Data
9. Can You See The Great Wall of China From Space?
10. Earth Observation Satellite Launches 2024

Over the years we’ve noticed a number of blogs consistently in our most read, so the blog posts on colours in satellite imagery and differences between optical and radar data are always on the list despite being written in 2014 and 2016 respectively – meaning that what do colours mean in satellite imagery is a blog post that is a decade old! The rest of the top eight follow the normal pattern, although the number of satellites from 2014 being so high up the list is a surprise!

For our second top list, we thought you might be interested in the most read blogs written this year. You already know the top one from above, but the remainder of the top ten are:

2. Earth Observation in Asia & Africa
3. NASA Ambitions for Earth Observation
4. Rideshare for Earth Observation CubeSats
5. EarthCARE Satellite Launch Imminent
6. Celebration for Proba-1 CHRIS
7. Growth of the Earth Observation Sector
8. Sentinel-2C Ready for Launch
9. Latest Earth Observation Satellite Launches – particularly interesting for this one to make the list as it was only published in the middle of November!
10. Earth Observation Small Satellites

We know that the blogs in the early part of the year have time on their side to reach the top ten, but it is always interesting to see which posts have caught the imagination of readers – besides satellites orbiting the Earth!

Another interesting stat, at least to us, is to see how far and wide they are read. Looking at the WordPress stats in the last year we had views from 210 different counties/territories – this is 6.6% increase on the number of countries from last year! We know that this is technically IP addresses, rather than defining where the reader lives, but the spread is still impressive. The top ten countries IP addresses with views of the website are:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. India 
4. Canada
5. Australia
6. Germany
7. France
8. Indonesia – this is a new country in the top ten for us!
9. Netherlands
10. Spain

This is our review of the year. Have you read all of our posts? Have you got a favourite blog post not on the list – let us know!

We’d like to thank everyone for taking the time to read our blogs, and we hope we can catch your eye a few times next year. We’ll continue to highlight the key activities happening in our industry and other items we find intriguing in the world of Earth Observation and satellite data.

Warmest wishes to everyone for the New Year, and having a happy, healthy, and successful 2025!