2025 Wrap-up for the EOA

As the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas heads into our twentieth anniversary year (the EOA debuted online in May 2006), we thought we’d share some numbers from the past year.

In 2025, the CALS EOA had a total of 2.3 million sessions, 2.3 million users engaged, and 3.4 million page views. That’s an average of about 200,000 sessions, 200,000 users engaged, and 300,000 pages viewed per month. And where do our visitors come from? All over the world, in fact—including from Antarctica!

While the United States made up about 1.6 million of our viewing population this year, we also saw over 10,000 views from China, the United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, and Australia. Under 10k included Germany, India, the Netherlands, France, Ireland, Sweden, the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand, Indonesia, Spain, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Poland, South Africa, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway, Argentina, Türkiye, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Denmark, Switzerland, Vietnam, Colombia, Thailand, Belgium, Finland, Pakistan, Romania, Chile, Hungary, Kenya, Czechia, Malaysia, Peru, Austria, and Greece. In the hundreds were another 78 countries, with another 76 nations in the two digits, and a final 31 countries in the single digits. So, there you have it, folks! The CALS EOA—centered on Arkansas, yet a resource of the world.

I’ve been with the CALS EOA for sixteen years and counting, but I still remember a story I was told toward the beginning of my time here. Back when the encyclopedia was young, we wanted to be able to tout our having been accessed from every continent in the world. But back then, Antarctica didn’t have a unique IP address identifying it. So one of our staffers called up the research station there and politely asked if the scientists there wouldn’t mind loading up our site! Thus we were able to brag that our site had been visited from every continent. Now, a couple decades later, I recorded a December 2025 visit from Antarctica—the only new one since the first one! Guess they finally got their IP address to indicate their location…

CALS EOA 2025 By the Numbers

Most-read entries:

1. Tony Alamo
2. Elaine Massacre
3. West Memphis Three
4. Sundown Towns
5. Titan II Missile Explosion
6. Westside School Shooting
7. Albert Pike
8. Duggar Family
9. Negro Boys Industrial School Fire of 1959
10. Ronald Gene Simmons

Most-viewed media (click on image to see larger image and caption):

• Wet/dry counties (trends on Fridays!)

• Ravenden’s Raven
  
• Edward Coy Lynching (sensitive content; image available here)
• Arkansas Natural Divisions

• Arkansas’s County Seats

• Tornado Touchdown Map

• State Police Regional Troops Map

• WKKK Headquarters

• Civil War Events

• Cottonmouth

Entries uploaded:

346

Images and other media uploaded:

1,339

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Other developments in 2025 included expanding our list of quizzes, adding the county explorer feature, creating some lesson plans (with more to come!), and employing a feature to require a click to see sensitive images on the site such as scenes of violence and its aftermath. And we’ve got more new site features planned for 2026!

Finally, we’ve amassed seventy EOA Minute segments, narrated by frequent EOA contributor Mark Christ. Have a listen and see if they pique your interest for delving deeper into the EOA! The full list is available on YouTube here.

By Jobe, editorial assistant at the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas and programmer for the CALS Writing Circle