What's Popular?

One of the things that the Google blogger software provides you with is statistics on how many hits the blog gets.  Aside from total page views, there is a ranking of pages in order of hits received.  This particular statistic has always struck me as inexplicable - why do people go to one page more than to another?  But I am starting to form some theories.  First a list of the three all-time highest hit getting postings that I have made. Ready?

 

Number one is The Iqyax^ and the Sea Otter with roughly 7000 hits. 

Number two is The Frilled Lizard Boat with roughly 1500 hits.

And number three is Aleut Bent Wood Hat making with roughly 1000 hits.
How to explain this? 
Here is my theory.
Until I posted about the sea otter, the frilled lizard page was the most popular.  The reason I think is that somewhere in grade school, kids learn about funny looking animals and encounter the frilled lizard.  So then they go on the internet and search for frilled lizard pictures for their school report and voila, they find my page.  Same goes for the sea otter page.  Sea otters are possibly the cutest animals ever and so any page with sea otters will get hits. Bent wood hat making has no cute animals in it, but this may also be a legitimate search topic in Alaska.
So what does this all mean? 
What it means is that cute animals drive up total hits but falsely inflate hit rates and give me a false sense of how much interest there is in skin boats. So if  I  throw in the occasional sea otter or baby goat in a future post, it will be to investigate whether my theory is correct, or maybe I will just be looking for an ego boost.