Like a lot of you, I can’t stop feeling blown away by the fact that it is now 2015. I may have a bit of a jump on some of you, since we are now finishing up the February 2015 issue of Ethanol Producer Magazine. With magazine deadlines, we’re always working several months ahead. Still, considering I had my daughter in late 2013 and she is now more than a year old, it is a shock how quickly time flies.

Last week, I looked back on 2014 and identified the news stories with the most views on our website. This week, I decided I’d do something similar for what we call feature stories, the longer, more in-depth stories in our magazine.

I checked each of the 12 issues of 2014 and identified the feature story with the highest number of views in that month. Using that system, here are the top three most-read feature stories of 2014, in order of number of views.

No. 1 is Clear Sign of Confusion, a story about changes to OSHA’s hazcom rules, which was printed in the December issue of EPM. It’s funny because, to be honest, when I pitched that story in our planning meeting, I made the comment that it was sort of a niche topic that I wasn’t sure a wide audience would be interested in reading. I guess I was wrong!

An interesting side note about that story is that, not long after it was published, I received an email from someone from the American Coatings Association, who took issue with the first paragraph of the story. Bob Yule, product launch manager for Solenis, said in his presentation at the International Fuel Ethanol Workshop & Expo that a potentially confusing rating scale change was further complicated by the fact that ACA and National Fire Protection Association elected not to change their ratings scale. That potential confusion was confirmed by my other sources for the story, Kristi Ross and Mike Mowbray, both of U.S. Water Services. Although my sources confirmed the story does reflect thier views on this, to give ACA an opportunity to clarify its position and provide more information, we published a letter to the editor in the January issue of EPM. 

Moving on to the No. 2 story, Dakota Spirit Rising, a story written by my colleague, Sue Retka Schill, about the corn-ethanol plant under construction at Spiritwood, N.D. That’s a very unique and cool project and it makes sense that people would want to read about it. Sue wrote a great story for the September issue and recently updated our readers with a story that reveals the project is on track to startup in the second quarter.

The No. 3 most viewed story was, Fishing For Profit, a story I wrote about current uses and future opportunities for distillers grains as aquaculture feed. This is a topic I’ve been interested in for a long time and I really enjoyed writing the article for the July issue of the magazine. Personally, I feel aquaculture is a market that has great potential for the ethanol industry. Plus, it’s not often that I get the chance to put a picture of a fish in the magazine.

Here are links to the remaining top-viewed stories from the 2014 issues of EPM.

Beyond Corn Oil Extraction

A Squad Trained to Score

Boosting Biomass for Bioenergy

The Sugar Producers

E15 Retailers Get Creative

Collaborative Growth Platform

Piling It On, Strategically

Weighting On the Line

Reinvention With LESS Innovation

It’s an interesting exercise to see which stories are most read by our readers. Sometimes we are able to predict which stories will be of high interest, before we even finish writing them. However, it does happen often that we are completely surprised by what stories attract the most views.