About three days ago, the amount of views my blog has accrued this year surpassed the total from 2017.
With a lead-in sentence like that I’m sure you’re expecting this post to be an exercise in prideful self-fellatio.
To an extent I suppose it is, but part of the reason why it’s cool is because of interesting insights I believe I can pull out of the analytics. As I tend to look at.
For instance, here are the yearly statistics as of my writing this:
The bar graph shows an overall trend toward increasing views, and that’s sensible considering my blog has evolved from a class requirement to a digital resume and regular part of my writing life.
In 2018 the number of views jumped sizably compared to the growth from 2016 to 2017 due to my Summer Initiative and its aftermath.
Last summer was when I shifted the emphasis of my blog from writing a few times a month (mostly archiving stories) to writing nearly every day.
The jump from 1,944 to 4,210 views makes sense when audiences have a higher volume of content to consume on an almost daily schedule.
And that was when I only wrote daily for half the year.
This year I’m halfway to that number and we’re only at the end of May, which bodes well for further growth. Especially if I get a few more breakout posts like my Redondo Union Archives write-up:
Post uploaded on March 25, 2019
I may be on-track to surpass 2018 in views, but other aspects are faltering.
“Likes” is one statistic I have trouble explaining due to the lack of a noticeable tracker on WordPress. I can tell you that I received 129 likes on my posts in 2018 compared to the paltry seven in 2019 so far, but I can’t tell you why that might be.
However, I can say something about the trend in daily views and viewers.
As you can see in the 2017 v. 2019 analytics, I surpassed my views from two years ago with about 30 fewer individual visitors.
I’ve also noticed a pattern of more views-per-day recently in spite of less visitors coming overall. I used to see about six or seven views at most every day, but recently it has hovered closer to 20:
Even yesterday, where I was so busy with family Memorial Day barbecuing and playing Minecraft with my friends that I didn’t write a blog post, my site received 33 views.
The last time I hit views near that high was April 24, when I wrote about my collection of graduation gowns.
If nothing else, I hope this post can be a positive affirmation for you regular viewers that people notice when you put extra energy into something. Even when that something is as silly as a personal blog.
I find the analytics fascinating to sort through so I hope you found them just as interesting to consume!
But if you didn’t, how about you take a look at this views-per-country breakdown:
Because the map is always a fun thing to see in my opinion.
Featured Image courtesy of Carlos Muza via Wikimedia Commons
Work in Progress 