Attempted Bloggery: Blog Post No. 1300: Plus-Sizing the Readership

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Blog Post No. 1300: Plus-Sizing the Readership

Welcome to my 1,300th blog post. You'd think I'd know better by now. Anyway, I hope you brought your calculator.

My blog statistics are pretty straightforward, at least at first glance. There have been some 465,000 page views of Attempted Bloggery since its inception more than three years ago and the number grows by about 500 per day. Therefore I should be at 500,000 page views by Beethoven's birthday, which any Peanuts fan can tell you is December 16. There are only 26 people following the blog publicly and an unknown number of lurkers. It has always been my belief that the blog's followers are responsible for only a very small percent of the page views here. Most readers are directed to this site through a Google search.

For some time I've tried to use social media to promote the blog, hoping to find more of my elusive target audience. My Twitter account now has some 476 followers, almost twenty times the number of my blog followers. More recently, I've been using Google+, where I already have more followers than on the blog itself. If you run a little experiment and search either of these sights for hashtags consisting simply of the name of New Yorker cartoonists past or present, you'll likely come across some post of mine. While I would hardly characterize myself as an early adopter of anything, I do seem to be one of the few people using such hashtags in this way. That either means that I'm way ahead of the curve or, more likely, that I don't understand hashtags. For better or worse, my social media endeavors have created a significant number of followers who know much about what's on this blog without actually having to visit it.

My profile page on Google+ has one statistic I really don't understand. Somehow I have four and a quarter million "views" on Google+. That's 100,000 views for each follower, which is evidently meaningless, or 9 views for each time the blog has been viewed. What gives? My posts on the site are all public, but that doesn't begin to account for more than 4 million views. I suspect Google is not only looking at page views of my blog (which is hosted by Google's Blogger), but at individual views of photos on the blog as well. Certainly many blog posts contain multiple images. Anyway, that's my best guess for now.

My Google+ Profile Page, October 4, 2014

November 1, 2014 Update: Scarcely four weeks later, all-time page views on the blog have increased by 14,000 to 479,000, while views on Google+ have increased by nearly 250,000. I still don't understand what is going on, but Google+ is on fire.

My Google+ Profile Page, November 1, 2014

Note: If you like, you can follow me on Twitter. It's a good way of finding out when I update old blog posts, among other things.

Why not follow me on Google+ too? Check out my hashtags.

Let's hear it for the hundreds! All the previous Attempted Bloggery centennial posts are at your fingertips: