CRN Australia's biggest news for 2019 ... as picked by you!

As the first half of 2019 comes to a close, CRN has looked at the most-read stories in each week of the year. What did you click on? And what does it say about what the Australian channel wants to read?

Click ahead to learn more ... 

Before we get into the week-by-week, here's a treat: a word cloud built from the headlines of our 100 most-read stories of the year so far. You sure like reading about telcos and clouds!  If you want a closer look at the word cloud, we uploaded a big version of it here.

CRN returned from its summer break in the week of January 7th and the story you all fired up about was Microsoft Australia cracking the $2 billion revenue mark.

Someone nasty cut some Telstra cables in Lismore, disrupting services in and beyond the northern NSW town. And getting you clicking in the week of January 14th!

Telstra proved our most popular attraction for a second week, with news of its capacity boost on submarine cables to Asia proving our most popular story for the week of January 21st.

5G got you reading in the week of January 28th, which was when Optus announced home broadband plans using the new wireless standard. And the nice cylindrical modem you see above!

The following week, that of February 4th, we learned that NBN reseller Prime Connect had closed and transferred its customers to DCSI Internet. The low margins available to NBN RSPs continues to generate news.

Controversy! In the week of February 11th, as MacTel boss Aidan Tudehope got stuck into Huawei for sending letters critical of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute to its partners. Google and Tesltra were mentioned in the mess, too.

In the week of February 18th, Telstra announced it would henceforth offer just two home broadband plans. Huge interest in that story made it the week's top read. And on June 25th we had a sequel of sorts, as Telstra binned 1,800 mobile plans and introduced just 20 replacements.

Telstra's exclusive voice deal with Microsoft has made plenty in the channel grumpy. So when we learned  that  CommChoice had developed its own voice service for Microsoft Teams, readers appreciated this week-of-February-25th read.

In the first week of March, Linus Torvalds released verison 5.0 of the Linux Kernel. Rolling over to a point-oh release means nothing in the Linux world - Torvalds just doesn't like going past version .20. But plenty of you wanted to read the news anyway!

Who doesn't like a good legal drama? CRN readers clicked in, hard, to news that Telstra's sub-brand "Belong" started a trademark fight with Belong Energy over just who the name "Belong" belongs to.

Google had a rotten March, with outages for Gmail, GDrive and various parts of its cloud. We wrapped them all up as Google's terrible, horrible, no good very bad fortnight and it became our most-read story for the week of March 18th.

Hybrid cloud is a huge trend this year and clearly you're keen to learn more about it - why else would this piece on new on-prem Azure options have been the most-read story for the week of March 25th?

April foul! The first week of April saw you clicking mad about a big Telstra outage that took days to repair. But you also enjoyed our April 1 gag about Jim's Group and its possible forays into technology services.

Mirosoft hit the pause button on its next Windows 10 release in the week of April 8th, and you hit your mice to read about why. 

The bad news for Windows just kept coming, as in the week of April 15th Microsoft admitted its OS wasn't playing nice with some popular security software. 

And that's a hat-tick of woe for Microsoft! In the week of April 22 we learned that Windows 10 could mess with PC storage. And enough of you worried about it to make that the week's top story.

A month that started with you wanting to read about Telstra ended with you wanting to read about Telstra, this time becuase it changed broadband pricing again.

The previous slides show that you like reading about Linux and like reading about Microsoft. And in the week of May 6th you most-liked to read about Microsoft adding a full Linux experience to Windows 10. 

AMD's done a really good job with its recent CPUs. But then it went and put out a weird report claiming that Australia's government had tested them and found they weren't noticeably better than Intel's silicon. You found that so odd that it topped traffic in the week of May 13th.  

There's a saying in journalism: "If it bleeds, it leads". Which is probably why you liked this story about a big Optus outage in the week of May 20th.

Microsoft quietly announced it would change the way it publishes licensing documents, and so many of you wanted to know about the changes that it topped the traffic charts for the week of May 27th.

DiData's been around for ages and news that its brand would soon disappear set you clicking in the first week of June. We're still disappointed none of you pointed out that DiData snuffed the Com Tech brand after buying that for a cool billion back in 2001. Kids these days ... 

Until the week of June 10th, all of our top weekly stories were written in CRN's Australian office. That changed this week, as a tale of NetApp and Azure went large.

Making a profit on PCs is tricky these days, which is probably why so many of you wanted to about the PC assembly company using prison labour to restore old PCs into working order. There's lots of shades of gray in this one: it's part of an education program and the PCs end up in government.

We've had to prepare this story before the end of the month, so we can't be sure which story will top the charts for the week of June 24th. The contenders are Microsoft's new command line tools and news of an IT consultant copping a three-year sentence for insider trading.

One last slide before we go, to recognise that our photo galleries often attract lots of interest among readers ... especially when they show you having fun. As you did winning the CRN IMPACT Awards, or just frocking up for the night.  You also liked seeing your peers throwing axes, having fun at CRN Pipeline Melbourne, Pipeline Sydney or events like ConnectWise's first major event in Australia.