Counting the Hits

Some of you may have noticed the counter that popped up at the bottom of the page today; it's a relatively new feature of Blogspot, along with a user statistics function available from the dashboard. The upshot of all of this new software is that, for the first time in nearly four years, I have an idea of how many people are reading this blog, and where they are coming from. It's been a rather strange, if eye-opening experience...

To begin with, the stats function (and the counters) only go back to last summer, or less than six months total, and probably the least productive six months in the entire history of this blog as well. Despite this low spot in my productivity, I still seem to be getting somewhere around 500 to 600 discrete visits each month, or somewhere around 20 per day. Unsurprisingly, most of the individual page views seem to cluster around things that would be common search terms in their own right - almost 10% of the views were the result of my post about the ethics of Amazon, which probably means people were searching for web sites that mention "Amazon" and "ethics" and found my post about them. Still, it's a lot of interest for a little business blog written by a guy nobody ever heard of...

Even more peculiar, at least from my point of view, is the huge range of countries our readers seem to come from. Only a little over half of the hits are from the U.S.; almost one-sixth of them are from the Netherlands, and nearly 10% are from Germany, neither of which makes much sense. I also seem to have a number of readers in Brazil, or at least one who comes here often. The rest seem to be scattered across Asia, including Russia and the Far East. Some of my students have been from those parts of the world, but if any of them found the blog by searching under my name those hits would be coming from here, not from overseas...

Oddest of all, I think, is that a significant number of those hits came from people searching for my name on various search engines. Why people from other countries would be searching for me by name passes understanding; perhaps some of my students have told other members of their families about me, and people are combing the Web looking for leverage. In any case, it does give you an idea about the economics of blogging - and why so few of us can make a living this way...

If I average 500 visitors a month (which is at least 490 more than I thought we were getting), and 2% of them were to click through on an ad to a sponsoring website (which is more than most blogs-based ads get) and if I got a penny for each one (which is higher than usual) that would still only be 10 cents a month; not even enough to make a phone call. I'd need 500 times as many visitors just to cover my DSL bill; 50,000 times this number to generate a good living. And frankly, there aren't too many blogs that get 2.5 million visits a month...

I'm not sure how much different my blog is going to be now that I know how many people are reading it, but I don't suppose it will change much. I'm still reaching a tiny, and mostly random audience, and still writing mostly because I want to, and still declining to monetize, commercialize or civilize this space.

But I'll keep you posted...