30 Most Popular Web Stories of 2015: Home Automation Wins Again

Home automation standards, low-voltage DC power distribution, IoT at retail and the demise of VIA International grabbed CE Pro page views in 2015.

Published: December 30, 2015Julie Jacobson

CE Pro serves the custom electronics industry with news and information on home systems integration, yet time and again readers gravitate to articles that are more consumer and less custom – DIY home automation hubs, Sonos and smart doorbells, for example.

They also like to read about industry failures – Wink and VIA International top the list – as well as HDMI and all the problems associated it.

Here we assemble the 20 most popular articles (by page views) on CEPro.com for 2015. We ignored articles with very long tails, like “How Vivint Sells 200k Security, Automation Systems in a Summer,” which grabbed about 9,500 page views this year – four years after the story was posted.

Also, we didn’t count page views for photos. “Rent Kevin Durant’s Former Miami Penthouse for $20K” was the clear winner there.

Business-related stories didn’t top our “most popular” round-up, but only because such articles don’t draw the attention of industry outsiders.

Three of the most popular business-related pieces for 2015 were:

Top Integrators Launch HAUS, a Franchise-Like Program for Mainstream Home Automation (new business models in the mid-market)
7 Big Mistakes Every Integrator Makes (like hiring family and taking unprofitable jobs)
From Company Jet to Vehicle Fleet: Sound Concepts a $6 Million Integrator (high-end integrator Sound Concepts beefs up RMR)

And the three most popular white paper topics were:

To be clear, the “top” white papers refers to the number of page views for the promo page, not the number of downloads for the documents themselves.