Simpler blogging times

A dozen years ago, I was pleased to see that this blog reached 150,000 page views, roughly six years into its existence. This was kind of a big deal to me at the time (the graphic up top is my Facebook post from that time), even though I knew it was a pretty meaningless number. “Engagement” is a more important statistic (or “metric” in the jargon) because it includes more than just the folks (or bots and web crawlers) that happen to briefly visit a web page. Still, I did like “big numbers”.

Google explains a “pageview” and how it compares to a “unique pageview” this way:

A pageview is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a user clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well.

A unique pageview… aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

The huh?! factor in such descriptions is largely why I eventually stopped paying any attention to the “metrics” for any of my sites. I never fully understood what they were talking about, but, more importantly, I realised it had no relationship to what I was doing: The whole point of my blog was to write about whatever I wanted to, not what the “metrics” suggested would bring eyes to the page. All of which is also probably why this blog only ever achieved a relatively small audience.

Nowadays, old-timey blogs like mine are relics. There are many successful descendants on places like Substack, often available only by paid subscription. I won’t be doing a subscription thing like that because it would require way too much of a commitment that I’m clearly not up to at the moment—that and subscription fees are potentially taxable in two countries, so what’s the point? Actually, all of that’s arguably true for my audio-only podcast, too, except that paid subscriptions for them aren’t as common as it is for the descendants of blogs like mine.

Everything’s changed since then (including my commitment to blogging), but at this point in November 2012, achieveing 150,000 pageviews was still a big deal. Twelve years later, my old-timey blog’s current total page views (also since 2006) is 3,439,541 (at the time I wrote this). I may not care about such “metrics” like I did a dozen years ago, but I still like big numbers—especially when they become bigger numbers. That much is still the same.