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:

Blog Post No. 100
Blog Post No. 200:  A Shaggy Dog Story
Blog Post No. 300:  From the Libraries of Searle, Koren, Booth, and Saxon
Blog Post No. 400: The Attempted Bloggery Quiz
Blog Post No. 500:  The Second Attempted Bloggery Quiz
Blog Post No. 600:  What I Do When I'm Not Blogging
Blog Post No. 700:  The Many Hazards of Blogging
Blog Post No. 800:  Think Locally, Blog Globally
Blog Post No. 900:  The Blog I Was Meant to Write
Blog Post No. 1000: Happy New Year, Lurkers and All!
Blog Post No. 1100:  The Power of Google

Blog Post No. 1200:  The Ukrainian Situation

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Blog Post No. 1100: The Power of Google

January 7, 2012 was the very first date this blog received 1,000 page views. It turns out that day was the centennial of Charles Addams, the creator of the Addams Family and many great and ghoulish cartoons. Google, the popular search engine, honored the memory of Addams with a Google Doodle on its home page, and thus many internet users with perhaps only a casual interest in the artist were prompted to search for the master's macabre cartoons. This blog even back then was a minor player in the online world of Charles Addams, and the uptick in traffic was enough for Attempted Bloggery to reach just over 1,000 page views for the first time. The lesson was clear:  Google possessed the powerful ability to direct web traffic to a great many specific places, including this blog.

Charles Addams Google Doodle

January 7, 2012

A glance at the monthly page views received by this blog shows an all-time peak for the month of October 2013. Since that date, the monthly page views have fallen off considerably, although not quite to what they had been previously. What then was behind the increase in this blog's internet page views in October?

The graph shows Attempted Bloggery page views for each month since the blog's inception, with the most pronounced peak occurring in October of 2013. Uncharacteristically, Google has mislabeled the three years to the left on the x-axis; this blog was begun in June of 2011, not 2009.

A closer look at the peak month of October 2013 shows that the increased web traffic did not occur throughout the entire month, but only during about two weeks, between October 9 and October 21, and then again on the last day of the month.

Attempted Bloggery page views for October 2013

A weekly graph highlighting the increased page views received on the last day of October 2013.

Here's an earlier view of the brief run-up that began suddenly after October 9 and ended in under two weeks.

Attempted Bloggery's Page Views, September 23, 2013 to October 22, 2013

Intrigued? I was. One might imagine one particular page or search term was generating the unusual traffic, but that wasn't the case. The sources of incoming web traffic were unchanged as were the distribution of page views; there were simply more total page views in the same general pattern as always. And, as always, the prime referring site was Google. For whatever reason, no other search engine makes a significant contribution to web traffic here. My conclusion, then, was that the increased page views seen on this blog was solely because of increased search engine traffic from Google.

Search engine optimization is a goal of many websites, but realizing this kind of sudden upturn in traffic volume from one search engine is something largely out of one's control. The details of Google's ranking algorithm are proprietary, of course, but having external websites link to yours is probably one of the factors that increases a website's ranking in search results. Why such an effect should last for only two weeks and then largely disappear is a matter for conjecture. It could be the result of a minor tweaking of Google's algorithm or of something entirely different. Perhaps the increased traffic referred to this blog didn't stay on a page for more than a few seconds on average, and Google recognized that. Perhaps the bounce rate was high. Maybe Google's search engine results favor those sites that use AdSense, rather than an advertisement-free blog like this one. It's difficult to know what went on with any certainty.

Monthly page views here are currently on the order of 17,000. If page views were maintained at the higher rate seen briefly in October, it would come to some 45,000 page views per month, which sounds agreeable enough to me. While there would be little point to bringing readers here who are not interested in the subject matter, it is most essential that those readers who do wish to learn more about the topics covered on Attempted Bloggery are able to find their way over here.

Note:  All the Attempted Bloggery centennial posts may be reread here:

Blog Post No. 100
Blog Post No. 200:  A Shaggy Dog Story
Blog Post No. 300:  From the Libraries of Searle, Koren, Booth, and Saxon
Blog Post No. 400: The Attempted Bloggery Quiz
Blog Post No. 500:  The Second Attempted Bloggery Quiz
Blog Post No. 600:  What I Do When I'm Not Blogging
Blog Post No. 700:  The Many Hazards of Blogging
Blog Post No. 800:  Think Locally, Blog Globally
Blog Post No. 900:  The Blog I Was Meant to Write
Blog Post No. 1000: Happy New Year, Lurkers and All!

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The Cost of Blogging

First off, I'd like to say that Google, which has been hosting my blog for the last year and a half through Blogger, has been a fairly reasonable silent partner in this enterprise. The company maintains a good product, although it is perhaps not quite as good as it thinks it is. There are some irksome technical features to deal with, but overall I have been able to create a niche blog that is pretty much off the beaten path. Anyway, I doubt there is a better blogging platform out there. Of course, since inception there has been absolutely no editorial interference and there also has been no charge even though Blogger has received no advertising revenue from my blogging efforts. In the meantime I have slowly expanded the visual if not the intellectual content of the blog and I find myself using far more of my screenshots and personal photographs than I used to. At least this was the state of affairs on Monday evening when I attempted to upload some new images and I received this dreaded notice:

Look, 1 GB is simply not a lot of storage for images today. My camera's memory card alone is now 4 GB. My iPad Mini has 64 GB of flash memory, but that's only because the 16 and 32 GB models were sold out at the Apple store. I have used only 2.1 of my 10 GB of free storage on Gmail since early 2006, and I could probably keep going another quarter century at this rate without a problem. Google is fairly generous with its free email allotment, but it can afford to be because almost no one needs anywhere near 10 GB worth of email storage. By comparison, 1 GB of free storage for Picasa Web Albums means that nearly every serious user of the product is going to bump up against the limit sooner or later. Storage space is not transferrable among Google products, so your lifetime supply of email storage, for example, can't be used to store photos for a blog, not even if your blog is dedicated to making the world a groovier place.

Now, to be fair, $2.49 per month for up to 25 GB of image storage is fairly reasonable, but it's a subscription rate and I'm not convinced you are purchasing storage at all. Rather than purchasing storage outright, you are buying the ability month by month to keep uploading images up to your 25 GB total. Once you reach 25 GB, as I would in maybe a couple of decades at the current rate, you need to purchase the 100 GB monthly subscription. You can stop subscribing at any time and this will not affect the images you have already uploaded and stored, which is why I believe calling this a storage fee is something of a misnomer. You are actually paying for the privilege of uploading images up to a predetermined quota, which sounds much more like paying for bandwidth, with a surcharge for large amounts of data previously uploaded and stored. The typical user of the 25 GB plan is probably nowhere near the upper limit. My uninformed guess would be that the average blog user has maybe 2 GB in image storage, although this might be much higher for those storing family photos.

Along with the subscription plan, Gmail storage gets automatically upgraded from the 10 GB you likely will never need to 25 GB you almost certainly will never need. That's a relief, albeit one you don't need.

So, after eighteen months, the cost of blogging has gone up to $2.49 a month, or almost $30 annually. In truth, I spend far more than that buying cool things I come across while researching potential blog posts. For me, though, the true cost of blogging always has been the inordinate amount of time I end up crafting each new post and subtly revising older ones in the hope that they will look spontaneous and effortless.

There is one more cost to be reckoned with, and that is the ultimate impermanence of the medium. I don't suppose anyone knows what will become of inactive blog accounts over the long term. How long will a blog like this one be allowed to remain online taking up precious storage after the monthly fees stop being paid and it becomes inactive? Google has gone to great lengths to create a vast searchable database of rare books. Will it show the same concern for obscure and obsolete blogs? I recall the sad fate of Geocities, and I wonder...


March 21, 2013 Update:  I am no longer paying Google for storage, if only temporarily. I have been regularly deleting photos I no longer need, with the result that my total storage has gone down to 0.35 GB. So after three months of paying $2.49/month, I am now taking a free ride again. Of course, when it comes time for me to once again buy monthly storage, the price may be more than $2.49/month, even though the cost of storage has generally been coming down. Also, Google now says my photos are stored in Google+, even though I so far have resisted every effort of theirs to compel me to join this.

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