Blog Statistics: Don’t Get Too Excited, Bloggers

For a while, my blog on online video was getting no more than a few dozen people a day. Then it grew to a few hundred, and eventually to 2-10,000 per day.  When I moved it over to this location (hosted instead of using free WordPress) I noticed a radical drop in daily views.

Then it occured to me. The vast majority of the previous traffic was not to view my daily post. It was people stumbling into legacy posts, or finding my site from search engine queries (for random words). So it’s quite deceptive.

In any event, the lesson is… your blog will eventually gather a steady increase in daily volume. But much of that is likely going to old posts and doesn’t count as a regular audience. To really gauge the impact of your blog, look at the total views to each new post and the quantity and quality of comments.

The good news is that this makes it easier to resist the temptation to stick Google ads and referrer links on this blog. I never have liked those, and with the new modest traffic it would be trivial income.