Saturday, 13 October 2012

Half a million page views: laudable or lame?

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I noticed from the Stats that yesterday this blog broke half a million page views. It is running at somewhat more than 1000 page views per day - which is about double what it was when I began daily blogging.

Probably lame. But then of course I deliberately don't do the things that might increase usage - blogroll, linking, be topical etc. I hope (inter alia) to make this blog a bit of a haven from topicality and commercialism.

(These things seem to work, because whenever I break the rules and write a topical blog with links to high usage sites, I do get a lot more page views recorded. E.g. the recent posting on the death of Eric Hobsbawm, which also mentioned Mencius Moldbug and attracted his fan base.) 

But I can't really decide whether 500K PVs is something to be pleased about, or just rather sad - considering the blog has been going on a daily basis for more than a couple of years.

But my impression is that page views bear only a very indirect relation to the health of a blog. I have had unprecedented numbers of views over the past days - but people were merely looking at

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/this-is-your-brain-this-is-your-brain.html

...which seems to have been linked from somewhere. Yet on these same high viewing days I have had very few/zero comments.

And even the number of comments seems a poor guide to measuring the kind of impact I hope for. I had a email from a reader who said that a zero commented blog post had been one of the crucial factors in him becoming a Christian. What more could one ask?  An infinitely valuable outcome.

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