the bots have done it

The bots have taken me over a million unique visits for the month of June, according to my Blogger site-meter stats. Happened today. This means nothing, but a million of almost anything still feels psychologically significant. According to Google Analytics, whose readings are becoming more accurate the longer I use it, my real averages for the past 14 days are:

# views: 2.6K (the reading isn't more exact than that)
# active users: 1.4K
engagement time per active user: 42 seconds (perusing)
users by country/city: #1 Hong Kong; #2 German; #3 United States; #4 South Korea; #5 UK

My real daily stats—and Analytics doesn't consider bots—put me at a few dozen unique visits per day. That dovetails with my suspicions. It's an esoteric blog. I'll be curious to see what my Analytics stats look like after a month. Let's check back at the end of July. The data are still being collated, so as the kids say, It's still early days.

People who write might not want to admit it, but they do generally long to communicate even if their communication is lame and trashy. These Analytics stats are pretty pathetic after all of these years of blogging, but I'm an utter moron when it comes to marketing, and I know I've done nothing to build a larger reader base. I also know the secret to a popular blog, but I've never put that secret into practice: focus on just one thing. I can see why this works. In a grocery store, the aisles and sections are normally divided into specific themes; this provides consistency and allows you to focus on one thing at a time: this is the cereal aisle; here's the soft-drink aisle; now we're at the produce section, etc. There's focus. When a blog like mine is all over the place, it's like walking into a grocery store where all of the shelves have random content: you found some cereal boxes in Aisle 3, but they're not your favorite cereals: those are somewhere else, and now, you've got to find them. By the same token, people want the security of knowing what to expect when they visit a blog, and popular blogs rarely veer off track from their central theme/focus/emphasis. This ensures return customers. I, meanwhile—despite being interested in communicating with folks—tend to post about whatever's in my head, and with my multiple interests in current events and cultural miscellany, I've taken to embedding lots of videos on all sorts of topics.

One thing that'll change when I migrate over to Squarespace is that I plan to compartmentalize: the new blog will be more organized and less slipshod; people will have the option of reading only the free content or subscribing to read the (presumably) deeper content. If I can figure out how to create packages like "subscribe to any three topics for a reduced price" or "get all paid content (all-access pass) for a greatly reduced subscription fee," I'll put those choices out there as options.

If I continue to embed or pass along non-original content like memes and other people's YouTube videos, that "channel" will likely remain free (for obvious copyright reasons), but I might put it behind an "adults only" wall to minimize the possibility of Squarespace censorship, e.g., unjust accusations of "hate speech" made by oversensitive pussies.

As always, there's plenty to think about and a lot of stuff going on.