My stats and more in 2025: a year in review

By Dann Berg

Published or Updated on

A collage image of most of the items that are mentioned in this post

Every December, I enjoy taking a week to review and reflect on my past year. An important part of this process is writing the blog post that you’re currently reading. It’s a thorough exploration of the numbers, strategies, and things that made up my year.

I’ve been doing this for a long time. You can check out previous posts by year: 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Each year I reevaluate the format and add/remove sections based on relevance and interest. For example, I’ve focused much more on web traffic and subsequent revenue as that’s become more of my internet-presence story.

This has become one of my favorite rituals. I find it hugely valuable. Plus, as I’ve started making some money from my blog/YouTube channel in recent years, it’s a great way for others to get a sense of income potential from various creative projects.

If my 2025 had a theme, it would be stability. I had a steady full-time job that I enjoy at Squarespace, I continued publishing my monthly newsletter on schedule, and I didn’t move or make any large-scale life changes.

Most of my focus was on getting incrementally better: eating better, figuring out good skin and hair care habits, being a better developer, and improving my skills professionally. You’ll see this reflected in the content below.

This was my last year in my 30s (I turn 40 in March 2026), and I’m starting to think about what habits I want to help drive the second half of my life. The time is now.

Let’s get into the details.

Traffic across properties and projects

My internet presence continues to be mainly across these three channels:

I mentioned last year that I saw “huge traffic increases across all my web properties.” There was a new step-function in my traffic in 2025 that dwarfs last year’s growth, all due to a single article (and companion YouTube video): my review of the service Function Health.

Here’s a high-level overview of my traffic: people usually discover me through Google Search, finding dannb.org or my YouTube channel through searches for Function Health or Obsidian. From there, a segment of my blog traffic will explore other articles on my website (either from the Articles page or the Start Here page). A smaller segment still will discover my monthly newsletter and subscribe.

What does that mean in terms of numbers? Let’s take a look.

This website: dannb.org

I don’t have the same level of data to share for this website this year because, at the end of March, I accidentally broke Google Analytics. I was attempting to be compliant with GDPR (I think?) and added a cookie consent banner (possibly incorrectly?), and it nerfed my traffic numbers. I still got traffic, I just couldn’t see that traffic.

I implemented a solution in December 2025: switching from Google Analytics to Umami. Umami is fantastic, and I’m looking forward to having complete traffic data available to me again for next year’s Best Of post.

Even though I’m not able to share total traffic numbers, I still have access to top performing pages.

Table showing the top performing pages by pageview for dannb.org in 2025

Reviewing the top trafficked pages in more detail:

  1. My honest Function Health review: 100+ tests and what I discovered - This post did gangbusters this year, both in terms of traffic and affiliate revenue. The affiliate revenue was largely a happy accident, which I’ll talk about more below
  2. My Obsidian Daily Note Template - The crown jewel of my Obsidian content. This article continues to drive traffic thanks to high search engine ranking
  3. Obsidian Meeting Note Template - Once again, this was my second-most visited Obsidian article. I’m glad it’s continuing to help people
  4. My Obsidian People Note Template - Coming in third in terms of Obsidian content for another year
  5. 10 tips for smart Obsidian usage - Last year, this ranked as my tenth most trafficked article overall. It bumped up to spot five this year. This was wildly successful as a YouTube video, and I’m glad to see the article continue to get views
  6. Start here - A newcomer to my top articles. I created this page in 2024 as a way to help new visitors discover my best content. It’s serving its purpose well
  7. Daily Driver Task Management System - I love that this post still gets traffic. I should really make this into a YouTube video

As I mentioned, I don’t have Google Analytics to show a chart of my actual traffic, but I do have Google Search Console, which shows organic traffic from Google only. Since most of my traffic comes from Google, we can extrapolate total traffic numbers.

Chart showing traffic from Google Search to dannb.org in 2025

I published my Function Health review on March 8th, and the traffic increase from that one article is obvious from the chart above. Take a look at my Top Queries, also from Google Search Console.

Table showing the top performing pages by pageview for dannb.org in 2025

Function Health traffic dwarfs Obsidian traffic by a large margin. On top of that, the engagement is high. I’ve gotten several emails and messages from people asking questions or sharing their stories. I even had a coworker discover my channel because he was independently considering Function Health himself. Fun!

Function Health post, in depth

I’ve been focusing on my health more as I approach the milestone of 40 years of age (happening March 2026). This is due in part to an agreement I had with myself: I would be much more lenient with myself while younger (while I could) and then buckle down more later in life. That time has now come.

As part of that journey, I decided to sign up for Function Health. The service provides access to 100+ blood tests, plus follow-up tests at the six-month mark. It democratizes access to information about your own body and allows you to build a time series of your results over time. You can hear my detailed thoughts and experiences in my review blog post.

I got the test in January, and the testing cycle wrapped up with the final Clinician Notes in February. I thought the experience was great and I had a ton of opinions. I decided to write a review as a way to process and share my thoughts.

Towards the end of this writing process, I discovered that Function Health has a generous referral program. I decided to sign up for the program and add it to the review as an optional way for readers to say “thank you” if they liked the content.

That small decision turned out to be incredibly lucrative. In the spirit of transparency, I want to share exactly what that means.

From Function Health’s referral program: “Earn $100 for every new member who joins Function through your link and stays for 60+ days.” When I published the post, I had hoped I’d get a handful of successful referrals.

Instead, the post did better than I expected, and so did the referrals. As of the writing of this post, I’ve had 247 completed referrals and over $20,000 in balance paid out.

Screen capture of Function Health referral program, showing 447 referrals started, 247 referrals completed, pending balance of $4,700, and paid out balance of $20,400

It continues to surprise me how lucrative it can be to create content on the internet. The results from this post, along with my YouTube analytics (see below), make me feel confident that if I wanted to quit my job and be a “content creator” full time, I might actually be able to make it work. The question then becomes: is that something I actually want? As of today, I don’t think that it is.

Google Search Console

The majority of my traffic comes organically through Google Search. Fortunately, Google offers Google Search Console, which provides insights into how your web properties are performing and how people are finding you.

Let’s look again at the chart of impressions and clicks that are driving traffic to dannb.org:

Chart from Google Search Console showing my clicks and impressions over time. Clicks are between about 300 and 450 each day and impressions average around 15,000.

I already talked about the increase starting in March, due to the Function Health review article. That big spike in the middle of the year (July 11th) was when Function Health had a big sale or advertising campaign of some sort. I saw an a spike in traffic and referrals as a result of their campaign.

Last year, every single query that drove traffic to my blog was about Obsidian. Now, Function Health has taken nearly all the top spots:

Top queries include “function health review” and “function health”

It’s true that you really never know what article or topic is going to get popular. As I was writing the Function Health article (and especially as I was editing the video), I knew that I was super happy with the work. But still, I had no idea it’d take over my blog’s traffic.

The Dann Chronicles newsletter

This month (December) I finally moved my newsletter from Substack (boo) to Ghost (yay!). As part of that migration, I created a brand new custom theme (check out the site to view the theme and this post to read about the process). I’m super happy with my new newsletter home.

In terms of growth stats, here’s what I pulled from Substack before I made the switch.

Screen capture of Substack subscriber chart. It slowly grows from around 1,000 to just over 1.14k

I started the year with 1,008 subscribers and ended with 1,092, for a net growth of 84 subscribers. This is significantly lower than the roughly 500 subscribers I added in 2024.

Last year, there were two events that drove that growth: a “viral” Substack note and high YouTube engagement. This year, there were zero high-growth events, thus the slow-and-steady growth for the first half of the year before things mostly leveled off.

It remains to be seen how the move from Substack to Ghost will impact subscriptions. On the one hand, I think my new website design has a much stronger call-to-action and explanation of value. On the other hand, I wonder how much traffic came from Substack itself. Next year’s stats should answer that question.

But here’s where I feel conflicted: my newsletter is where I pour most of my heart and soul. About 90% of my content creation time is spent working on my newsletter because that’s where I have the most fun. But it’s also the platform that gets the least amount of views. I see a huge engagement increase when I focus attention on my blog or my YouTube channel. But I enjoy working on my newsletter more.

I also think my newsletter is some of my best work, even though few people (comparatively) see it. I’m not really sure what to do about that. Maybe I’ll try to initiate more collaborations in 2026 to see if I can get more eyeballs on the newsletter.

YouTube

My YouTube upload activity decreased significantly in 2025 due, in large part, to the demands of my full-time role at Squarespace. My YouTube growth stats were slower in 2025, reflecting this change.

YouTube subscriber line chart for 2025, showing the year starting at around 6,400 and ending at 8,642

I started the year with just under 6,400 subscribers and ended with 8,462, which means I added just over 2,000 subscribers this year. Not bad, given that I only uploaded two videos this year. But it could have been way better if I had buckled down and created more.

I also had a brief experiment with YouTube Shorts, using a third-party tool to automate the creation and publishing of shortform videos from my longer videos. I saw a huge spike in views, but the videos were low quality in my opinion, and I stopped publishing until I can figure out a better way to create quality shorts from my regular videos.

YouTube views chart. There’s a spike towards the end of the year, but mostly the chart is flat at around 700

Estimated AdSense revenue for these views was just shy of $1,000 for the year. This is pretty great, but pales in comparison to the affiliate income associated with the single Function Health video. It’s no wonder that big content creators focus on brand deals. That’s where the real money is.

GitHub

GitHub has a beautiful little chart that shows your activity over the last year. Each day is represented by a small colored square, and the shade of green indicates the level of activity on that date (darker means higher activity). In terms of GitHub activity, I had a pretty good year.

A color-coded calendar from GitHub with darker green days being days with more commits. It’s quite green, if I do say so myself.

Part of this activity is just automated Obsidian vault backups, but I’ve also had quite a strong year in terms of new code written and committed. GitHub is also where I manage my home server using Docker Compose (when I commit changes to the main repo, it auto-deploys on my home server). All these commits count towards that total.

I made several updates to my Kindle Clippings to Obsidian script (code I use myself every time I finish a book on my Kindle), and that open-source code base now has 79 stars.

A github repo star chart, showing growth over time. It starts way back in 2022, but has a spike in growth in 2025, growing to 79 stars

Another big development project this year was the custom Ghost theme for my newsletter The Dann Chronicles. I used this project as an excuse to really mature my solo development practice. This meant: creating issues for new feature ideas, being good about putting code related to each feature in their own branch, and always opening Pull Requests for changes to Main. These habits greatly improved my workflow even though I was the only one contributing to these repos.

I’m consistently impressed at just how powerful GitHub is as a tool. This was a year of taking advantage of some of those features, including GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages. I still can’t believe it’s all free.

Physical Health

Given the popularity of my Function Health review, let’s add a section to this post related to health. I started 2025 feeling motivated to work on my health (part of the reason why I signed up for Function Health in the first place). I’m turning 40 in a few short months, which has inspired me to be a bit more mindful in terms of exercise and diet. It’s not a fear of aging—it’s more a recognition of the work that will be required to remain physically and mentally sharp as long as possible.

January 2025 is when I signed up for Function Health and did the first round of blood testing. I documented that process in detail in that post, so I’ll refrain from recounting that here, but it proved to be a huge motivator for me throughout the year. Particularly, I was curious to see if changing my habits would have a positive impact on the follow-up tests six months later.

I weighed 178.4 lbs (80.92 kg) on January 1st. By changing my eating habits (eating fewer calories, more protein, more vegetables), I was able to drop down to my lowest weight of 156.3 lbs (70.89 kg) in September!

Apple Health chart showing monthly weight for Dann Berg for 2025. Average weight of 164.3 lbs. Starts at around 178 lbs and drops to around 156 in September before rising slightly to around 162 lbs. Screenshot from the app Happy Scale.

I started taking a few supplements after getting my Function Health results, but this habit lasted around six months before I stopped (for reasons I can’t quite recall). I imagine I’ll pick that back up in the new year after I get my next round of Function Health tests.

In the realm of good cosmetic health habits, this was my first full year using a topical Minoxidil/Finasteride spray to help prevent hair loss (so far, so good!). I also started a prescription anti-wrinkle face cream (Tretinoin, Niacinamide, and Azelaic Acid) and daily facial sunblock. Both of these new habits were inspired by Bryan Johnson.

I’ve been researching red light therapy (hair, face) but haven’t pulled the trigger yet because the price is so high. That might be a 2026 project.

Favorite Books Read

This was another light-ish year of reading when compared to my pre-pandemic levels. At a certain point, I should stop comparing my levels to pre-pandemic—enough time has passed that this is just how I read now. I did have an uptick in reading time towards the end of 2025, which makes me believe that 2026 will have a higher volume consumed. Regardless of the total number of books read, I still have a few favorites:

  • Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’ If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All - A very compelling case in a matter where I have exactly zero influence
  • Luis Elizondo’s Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs - I don’t know what to make of this whole UAP thing. The signal-to-noise ratio makes it nearly impossible to suss out the “truth.” Not that I’d even know what to do with the truth. Either way, it’s interesting to read accounts like these from officially credentialed sources
  • Stephen King’s It - (re-read) I first read this in 2017, in preparation for the recent movie releases. Felt the itch to re-read this year, but decided to try the audiobook version. The audio is a tour-de-force, marathon performance by Steven Weber
  • Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind - (re-read) I enjoyed the audiobook of It so much, I decided to re-read another book in audiobook form. Despite this being my second read of Antkind, I’m still confused about my feelings for this book

Favorite Movies

According to Letterboxd, I watched 36 movies this year, down from 72 last year. It’s only now, as I’m reviewing my stats, that I realize how large the delta is between 2024 and 2025. I do feel like I still saw all the films that I wanted to see.

Once again, these are favorite movies that I watched for the first time this year. Not all of them were released this year. In no particular order:

  • Bugonia (2024) - Another year, another Yorgos Lanthimos film in my top list. This movie was a cool concept, expertly executed
  • One Battle After Another (2024) - Paul Thomas Anderson giving the world an absolute joy of a film. An instant classic
  • Weapons (2025) - Answers the question: what if The Barbarian but MORE. Loved it
  • Human Nature (2001) - I’d somehow never watched this early Charlie Kaufman movie. Quirky and fun—especially in light of the career he’d go on to have
  • Spermworld (2023) - The world is full of different types of people. The best documentaries pull you into bubbles you never knew existed. I guess I’m happy to know this one exists?
  • The Brutalist (2024) - Epic in breadth and scale not seen in cinema these days. I’m not sure when I’ll be in the mood to re-watch, but I’m very happy I saw this in theaters

Favorite TV Shows & Specials

  • Pluribus (Apple TV) - Definitely my favorite new show of 2025. You may have heard the buzz, and it’s all true
  • The Pitt (HBO Max) - I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this new show. Not only that, they plan to release a new season every year (a rarity these days)!
  • Severance (Apple TV) - After waiting several years, season two did not disappoint

Favorite Newsletters

I’m not just a newsletter writer; I’m also a newsletter consumer. These were the newsletters that brought me the most value and/or enjoyment in 2025.

Notable objects

Favorite apps

Here’s some of my favorite apps that I used this year, along with the platform where I personally use these apps. Some of these apps are available on other platforms.

Random highlights and accomplishments

  • Lost 22 pounds and ended the year below 165 lbs (one of my goals for 2025)
  • Officially made more from “content creation” than I did at my first full-time job after graduating college
  • Added 84 new subscribers to The Dann Chronicles (well below my goal of 400 new subscribers, lol)
  • Published four blog posts to dannb.org (missing my goal of 10 new posts)
  • My YouTube channel had 2,000 new subscribers. I can only imagine what this might be if I focused on creating more content.
  • Migrated my newsletter from Substack to Ghost
  • Ditched Google Analytics in favor of Umami.
  • Attended Burning Man for the first time. Survived!
  • Attended my first Broadway opening night for The Queen of Versailles
  • Continued hosting FinOps Foundation virtual Community Calls (five times per month) for regions across North America
  • Successfully averted crisis when our cat had a serious urinary blockage, thanks to VEG Williamsburg and pet insurance

Plans for 2026

  • Continue growing the FinOps practice at Squarespace
  • Figure out some automated workflow to transform newsletter content (which I’m already writing) into additional content (YouTube? TikTok? Social Media? Podcast? Other?)
  • Open-source the custom Ghost theme that I built
  • Revisit my custom Hugo theme for this website and add improvements
  • Find collaboration partners for either my newsletter or YouTube channel (or both)
  • Publish more articles on my blog in 2026 than I did in 2025 (at least five posts)
  • Add 400 new subscribers to The Dann Chronicles newsletter

Have a great new year! 🎊

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