thank you, readership

Sometime around the end of last year, this blog—according to its site-traffic meter—passed the three-million visits* mark.  Last month, probably because of the holidays, readership was low, and I didn't even make 20,000 visits for the month.  To reach 20K visits, I need to average about 700 visits per day, and so far, in January, I'm well on my way to doing that:  every day thus far has been over 700.  In terms of the big picture, this still puts me at the shallow end of the pool; I'm not receiving tens of thousands of visits per hour the way the big blogs do.  But that's fine:  I've chosen to blog the way I do, and people can take it or leave it.  This isn't about whoring myself for the sake of fame.  I'm happy to get the visits I do, but I'm also happy to be no more than a minor demon in the hellscape that is bloggerdom.  My thanks to all the readers—lurkers and commenters—who helped push me over the three-million mark.

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*NB:  Blogger's site-traffic meter doesn't distinguish between "page views" and "unique visits."  A unique visit is when you visit my blog and hang around there for a while.  If you "flip" through various pages of the blog by clicking on and reading different blog entries, then those are the page views that happen during a single unique visit.  The page-view stat is therefore much larger than the unique-visit stat.  If Blogger is counting page views, then my three-million stat is obviously inflated.  If it's counting unique visits, then the stat is more trustworthy.  A good explanation of hits, impressions, visits, page views, etc., is here.  And from this site, we learn the following about Blogger stats:

...the Blogger stats system counts visits from robots and search crawlers. You see, search engines like Yahoo, Google and Bing go out and crawl the web for pages and content multiple times each day. Every time they crawl your site, it is counted as a pageview in your Blogger stats. Those are not real people and are not really pageviews. I know, your Blogger stats are so much better! But they are not your true stats. Additionally, the Blogger system counts spam bots, while Google Analytics has the capabilities to identify these bots and to not count them as pageviews.

This discrepancy is good to know when you are buying advertising spots on other sites. If they claim a certain number of pageviews, shoot them an email and ask if that is from their Google Analytics or their Blogger stats. I have seen numbers differ by as much as 50%. So if a site is claiming 30,000 pageviews per month, it could actually be 15,000. That is important information to know when you are spending money on advertising.

So in all likelihood, my stats are inflated.