NickMNS, I believe you have asked yourself the correct question, and really know the answer.

How will the blog post benefit real users, not competitors? That's the only question to ask. You certainly don't want to help your competitors to your lunch. :)

The question is, is publicly disclosing the most popular pages, those that drive the most traffic from Google, of any value to my competitors? Or am I over thinking this?

My emphasis added...

- I was thinking to write about the entities that received the most traffic over the past year.
- does it makes sense to create a post that targets these popular entities?

I'm not getting the point of doing this. As I read what you're describing, these entities on your site have received traffic via organic search. Wouldn't a blog article targeting just these terms, if it ranked, in effect be cannabilizing your own traffic?

Also, what's the point of discussing traffic on your blog at all? Seems to me that the proper kind of site to dispense such information would be something like Google Trends, or one of the sites that provides keyword popularity information. They're taking a slightly different point of view, though, talking about how much something is searched... not about rankings on one site.

That said, the question about whether to talk about your most popular entity/ product/ topic, etc, for the year is an interesting one, and I can see some justification in doing it if the entities are unique enough to you that you're not simply providing a checklist for someone else to do it.

I can imagine a fashion site, a book review site (thinking NYT here), an auto manufacturer, a clothing designer, etc, might want to talk about their best selling products... but probably not optimized in such a way that they would be ranking for the entity name itself. It seems you'd actually be targeting something like "best selling", "our most popular", "most read" together with entities/ articles, etc.

This kind of publicity always runs the risk of alerting competitors. So does selling on Amazon. But I don't know how else you can advertise your specialty, assuming that it is a specialty and that you're good enough at it to be proud of it.

I can't think of an exact informational site equivalent... but in SEO, eg, there are many sites right now talking, say, about similar optimization factors that are going to be important next year... and there's enough variety, even with inevitable overlaps, to go around. But it's not pure entity keyword search rankings these SEO sites are depending on.

In terms of whether you're overthinking this, you may not be thinking about the right formulation of your question. If your entitites are simply commodities that anybody could duplicate, and where awareness might raise the competition on AdWords, and you can't offer any unique value, then you might be in kind of a precarious situation anyway. IMO, you should be considering how you can make this kind of article a useful marketing feature for your site... or how your site can develop enough identity so this might be possible.

I have worked in niches where there are a dozen imitators the next week copying everything the client does, so I understand that this isn't always easy.

>> is publicly disclosing the most popular pages, those that drive the most traffic from Google, of any value to my competitors?

short answer, of course it is helping your competitors.
to me it is just like having a 'best selling items' page ... totally insane if you are working a niche.

some competitors can and do check out your website on a regular basis and learn from the info that you give away!

If u want to help your viewers, write the same article about the entities that get overlooked by the search engines.

Thanks guy for the input. I'm not going to publish the post.

@toidi, I like your idea, my problem is that the entities that get seen are few, whereas the ones that are overlooked are many.

Pick the best of them or write multiple posts.

@toidi yes and no.
No, the nature of the entities is such that overall there is not best, they are basically all equal but different.

Yes, that is actually what I do on a regular basis (not so regular lately but that will hopefully change in the new year).
I take some feature that makes them different and take the best of those, eg: Top 7 entities with feature X and 11 most popular entities with feature Y.

So the point of the OP was to try and spin this to have some sort of year end theme to it. But I will stick to my typical pattern.

A collection of "Best of" (example) as a REVIEW (not duplicated content) is always on target any time of the year, or when reasonable. Much like "Trending Now", "Top 25", "Evergreen", etc. Just avoid duplicating the actual posts, no sense will diluting any as there is no benefit in that.