Afternoon #warmongers and #warhammercommunity I've said many times that I'm not chasing numbers on the blog. I'm not saying numbers don't matter because they do, in a small way. They at least give a sense of achievement, even if they are not the primary motivation for the blog. I always tried to acknowledge milestones as it's a motivation in itself. It gives me a reminder that people see value in what I post and keep coming back. However, I've always questioned just how accurate those figures are, whether they're real people or not. Certainly my Google analytics produce different results than blogger's own stats. But I can only go with the data I have and for the first time ever I've managed to get more than 40,000 views in a single month!
You can see from the graph it's been a long time coming. Back in 2016 I got very close with a few months breaking the 35,000 barrier, but for the last four years I've been getting less than half that monthly. I know a lot of people might want just those numbers but it was a bit of a shock to see it fall like that. It bothered me insomuch as I was under the impression 'blogging was dead' that YouTube had overtaken it as a medium to share the hobby. But I think there's a resurgence. I'm seeing quite a few new blogs start up and I hope that's a trend. Twitter is also growing the community and I think that then encourages people to carve out their own space in the blogging world.
Some might think this is a humble-brag or [the new phrase] flex, hopefully not though. I just need to recognise that even among the inevitable bots, there are a lot of people coming back to the blog. I know it's not always easy and I am never as brief as I'd like to be, but hopefully it's a rewarding experience and there's something worthy of your attention. Thanks for visiting and we'll no doubt be having another milestone celebration shortly [going by these stats]. For a blog named 40kaddict, about Warhammer 40k, that 40,000 view milestone was always something I hoped for, just for the synchronicity. Thankfully, now I can go back to ignoring the numbers and likes again etc. 😉
Delighted for you, 40k is always a fun number to apply to these things.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, when I took my son back to uni recently and came back via Warhammer World my car tripped over the 40k mark on the odometer. I obviously knew it would happen at the start of the journey. I was gutted when I looked down and it was 40,078 (or something less exciting). But definitely apt I went via the home of 40k. It's the little things that amuse me 😊
DeleteCongratulations on reaching 40k mark, I know if it was me, I'd be shouting about it everywhere!
ReplyDeleteThanks Steve, embarrassingly I might even hit 50k thanks to mentioning it! Genuinely don't know about the numbers...
DeleteGoogle Analytics claims just 4,120 page views, although that could be just the home page... 1,514 users though, of which 72% were new. I mean I love the data I just don't know if it's real or not.
Meanwhile, my AdSense data says just 3,468 page views this month. Now that's supposed to be any page with an ad on, so not just the home page and they should still appear on mobile. So none of these correlate, although the AdSense and Analytics are closer together.
I find it fascinating, when I peel back a layer and understand what's going on but most of the time it doesn't match up so it's another reason not to put too much store in it.