Despite doing this blog for nearly three years I find the views I get fairly mysterious. Many years ago I did a blog and got nearly zero attention and thought, WTF, why bother with this. The world is filled with noise and one more person on a soapbox is just overload to the world.
So when I started this blog I just did it for myself, never anticipating even a tiny bit of viewing. More when I started than now I liked to blab on about current events (in a variety of areas), mostly launching polemics about how stupid many modern trends are. I wore out the patience of those in earshot with my “sermons” so I figured, fine, write it down and broadcast to the world, and who cares if anyone pays any attention.
So it’s a been a surprise I’ve gotten the response I’ve gotten (and I fully recognize as blogs go, it’s not much). So I enjoy trying to make sense out of the limited stats wordpress.com provides about visits – i.e. why did I get any visits at all, how are people finding this.
So now that I have a fair amount of experience I’ve formulated a few tentative conjectures and tried to tease out of the stats any proof for these. So, first, here’s the strongest correlation I’ve found:
This shows 35 months of my data with #posts on the horizontal axis and #views on the vertical. The regression line and more importantly the r^2 at least suggest there is a correlation, i.e. if I write posts I get hits. But the correlation is not that strong (including lots of strong outliers as you can see) and also doesn’t really agree with the more subjective analysis I do (detailed stats are not available at WordPress.com like you could extract from weblogs on a dedicated WordPress site).
When I instead look at my posts that have had the most views and then correlate (subjectively) with the critical search term results and also referrers I actually see most of my hits come from searches, not regular readers. And then those views are correlated to a very small subset of my posts that probably hit a nerve in people’s interests (it must be since only with very specific search terms do any of my posts appear in the first 10 results which is what most people use). So, IOW, views are more correlated (by chance, i.e. hitting a hot topic) with total quantity of posts, not the amount of posts in a given time period. And that’s probably what my graph is showing, some correlation with amount of posting, but not that much.
So while I can reach a few other subjective conclusions (not well supported with any detailed analysis) I would conclude there are a couple of models that relate to views in any blog.
- having a steady body of subscribers generates some activity due to recent postings. I’m not quite sure how subscribers find out about new posts (presumably the WordPress Reader, maybe some via email notification) but this is the primary mechanism that would explain the weak correlation I see between #posts and #views.
- sticking to a single subject, primarily non-controversial one and also one that interests other people drives views because one’s posts may be of interest to that community. In my case the weak correlation I see in this is my bread posts (about 10% of my total view; not as many as I’d like to do, but have to bake some bread to have something to talk about). In contrast posts in a single blog that are all over the map on subject (even from a single bias, i.e. my liberal, atheist, nutrition POVs) has little correlation with visits, of course, unless you’re a somebody that people really like to follow.
- content doesn’t seem to matter, i.e. my posts are definitely too long to trigger much interest and tend to ramble (fine, that’s what I wanted to do, not chase popularity), but the times I actually try (careful writing and proofreading, light tone, photos, etc.) don’t seem to make any difference, at least that I can dig out of stats. Now I believe, but without proof, that quality of posts matters and bloggers who write well and briefly and interesting with visually interesting posts (pure text is hard to attract people to) will benefit from that quality, but that probably is only true when you’re a “somebody” people will wish to follow.
- catchy titles do help, a little. This is often recommended in posts about creating popular blogs and I see a weak correlation this is probably true, but that only gets attention and doesn’t hold it.
- now I have three public blogs, this one and two others. One I started with a great deal of enthusiasm (also thinking it would be a useful source on the Net) and found: a) it was too much work, b) it attracted little attention, and, c) it wasn’t very satisfying for me, so why do it if I’m not liking the process and no one else does either. But strangely that blog, which has been inactive for months, has far more views that my other secondary blog where I work fairly hard on interesting posts. My other blog, on a single subject (and thus not as rambling as this one), is hardly notice, but in that case I don’t care since, again, I’m doing that one for my own interests and if anyone else cares, fine.
- publicity matters! In my second month I managed to create a timely post that was picked for Freshly Pressed (which reading many of those I’m convinced is more an atta-boy pat on the back to keep blogger posting for WordPress.com can get ad views). But, wow, does it work (although nowhere near as much as it seems for other bloggers) and there was a residue of interest left from that. And in a small number of other cases this blog has been linked from other sites and I definitely see views driven from that. IOW, blogging is in fact “social” and establishing yourself as a member of a community drives views. But I’ve never bothered, other than an experiment or two, with any other attempts at publicizing (which probably works, but I wouldn’t know). If you’re blogging to be popular then there are a lot of things you need to do and I don’t want to do most of those, even though they make sense, since popularity is not my goal.
So I still find this whole shouting at the world interesting. Before the Net and the various soapboxes were created one had little chance to get even the slightest bit of attention, esp. from complete strangers. Now it is possible (especially if you do a good job of it) and that’s interesting. Despite this being a low interest blog I’ve had more people, at least view (maybe read a bit) of what I’ve written than any other form of creating content in my life (my software products were narrowly focused, not mass market, so not much quantity of attention to my work there). So I’m glad I’ve done this (readers may not be that interesting, but I like re-reading some of my old posts and I’m glad there is an archive of them) but I still have to ask myself – why am I doing this? But I’ll keep going, at least until I hit 1000 posts.
btw, in case you’re interested:
Here are my most viewed posts:
and a few of my favorites of the least viewed:
About dmill96
old fat guy, who used to create software in Silicon Valley (almost even before it was called that), who used to go backpacking and bicycling and cross-country skiing and now drives AWD in Wyoming, takes pictures, studies Spanish and writes long blog posts and does xizquvjyk.
dailydouq 
Blogging and views
Despite doing this blog for nearly three years I find the views I get fairly mysterious. Many years ago I did a blog and got nearly zero attention and thought, WTF, why bother with this. The world is filled with noise and one more person on a soapbox is just overload to the world.
So when I started this blog I just did it for myself, never anticipating even a tiny bit of viewing. More when I started than now I liked to blab on about current events (in a variety of areas), mostly launching polemics about how stupid many modern trends are. I wore out the patience of those in earshot with my “sermons” so I figured, fine, write it down and broadcast to the world, and who cares if anyone pays any attention.
So it’s a been a surprise I’ve gotten the response I’ve gotten (and I fully recognize as blogs go, it’s not much). So I enjoy trying to make sense out of the limited stats wordpress.com provides about visits – i.e. why did I get any visits at all, how are people finding this.
So now that I have a fair amount of experience I’ve formulated a few tentative conjectures and tried to tease out of the stats any proof for these. So, first, here’s the strongest correlation I’ve found:
This shows 35 months of my data with #posts on the horizontal axis and #views on the vertical. The regression line and more importantly the r^2 at least suggest there is a correlation, i.e. if I write posts I get hits. But the correlation is not that strong (including lots of strong outliers as you can see) and also doesn’t really agree with the more subjective analysis I do (detailed stats are not available at WordPress.com like you could extract from weblogs on a dedicated WordPress site).
When I instead look at my posts that have had the most views and then correlate (subjectively) with the critical search term results and also referrers I actually see most of my hits come from searches, not regular readers. And then those views are correlated to a very small subset of my posts that probably hit a nerve in people’s interests (it must be since only with very specific search terms do any of my posts appear in the first 10 results which is what most people use). So, IOW, views are more correlated (by chance, i.e. hitting a hot topic) with total quantity of posts, not the amount of posts in a given time period. And that’s probably what my graph is showing, some correlation with amount of posting, but not that much.
So while I can reach a few other subjective conclusions (not well supported with any detailed analysis) I would conclude there are a couple of models that relate to views in any blog.
So I still find this whole shouting at the world interesting. Before the Net and the various soapboxes were created one had little chance to get even the slightest bit of attention, esp. from complete strangers. Now it is possible (especially if you do a good job of it) and that’s interesting. Despite this being a low interest blog I’ve had more people, at least view (maybe read a bit) of what I’ve written than any other form of creating content in my life (my software products were narrowly focused, not mass market, so not much quantity of attention to my work there). So I’m glad I’ve done this (readers may not be that interesting, but I like re-reading some of my old posts and I’m glad there is an archive of them) but I still have to ask myself – why am I doing this? But I’ll keep going, at least until I hit 1000 posts.
btw, in case you’re interested:
Here are my most viewed posts:
and a few of my favorites of the least viewed:
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About dmill96
old fat guy, who used to create software in Silicon Valley (almost even before it was called that), who used to go backpacking and bicycling and cross-country skiing and now drives AWD in Wyoming, takes pictures, studies Spanish and writes long blog posts and does xizquvjyk.