Monday 28 March 2011

Blogging Audience

Blog Stats
Before I start this entry I need to explain something. There is something you can do on this website and probably other blogging sites too. There is something called "Blog Stats" and what it is is basically a tool that lets you view how many people have visited your page but also what kind of browser they're using, which website referred them to the blog and most important of all for this post is where these people are looking at your blog from.

Is It Just Me ?
I'm not sure if I'm the only blogger who actually cares and looks at them. I find it very interesting. I'm wondering if other bloggers regularly check where their audience comes from. I know of at least one other blog I read whose writer regularly checks which website he got his readers there, since he had made a post about it. However, other blogs don't seem to show anything about who is reading them. I've only started this blog last night but I'm already checking where my readers are from.

Weird Results
Some of the statistics are quite obvious and make a lot of sense. I am currently in Australia and have studied in the UK before, so it makes sense that I have readers from these places, but what seems pretty strange is that I also have readers from Hungary, Finland and Germany.

Happy
I feel quite content about my blog so far. I have actually gotten almost 50 views already in one day. I had expected something like this to not reach many people at all, and I know that 50 is nothing compared to some world-famous bloggers, but I find it quite nice to actually have reached people in my first day.

Who Are My Readers And What Do They Think ?
For some reason, having started writing this blog has made me feel the need for approval on this blog. I keep wondering:

  1. Who is actually reading this nonsense ? 
  2. These are just the musings of my mind ! How can this even be interesting to other people ?
  3. Do these people actually like what I'm writing or are they just reading because they are bored out of their minds and need a pastime ? 
  4. Could it be just another way for other students to procrastinate ?
The answers to these questions aren't a matter of simplicity. Having cited that the readers of my blog are already worldwide and this is the tiniest of blogs on the "blogosphere" - as they call it in the professional blogging circle - there must be some kind of common factor to this, or maybe not ?

My Thoughts
I think that most people reading this are probably bored out of their minds, but I might be wrong. Maybe some people think that reading this might give them more of an insight on the world as I see it, which I guess might be interesting to some. I read blogs that I find interesting or entertaining myself. I only read two blogs regularly and sometimes a few others if someones points me towards it. One regards one of my hobbies, computer games and the other is an actuality/way of life/politics/news blog which I find to be very well-written.

For now I haven't written much about any one topic, so I guess, that for now people are reading this out of curiosity too.
Yeah, didn't I say this wouldn't be a simple answer ?

Comments
I think that most other bloggers probably keep checking their views every day too. It's just so fun to see the number of views go up every hour or so.

Well, I would bet an empty plastic water bottle you never thought about this before !

10 comments:

  1. Finland calling.

    Everybody looks at the stats. You can't help it. I found it annoying at one point because I started to care about the stats, feeling elated when they went up and disappointed when they went down. Lately I don't care so much, although I do still follow them.

    Some of the stats are your own views, unless you've switched them off from the control panel.

    Some are bots.

    Some are more or less random clicks.

    And 50 hits a day is good. For comparison, I have about 100 on average nowadays; there was one month I went to about 200 a day, but that was because of a raging shitstorm I was involved in—if you want readers, getting into a fight always works. I've seen the stats on a few other blogs somewhat similar to mine, and this seems about average. If you get to 500 a day, you're already a high-profile site.

    But unless you hit on a really popular topic and write about it in a unique and interesting way and/or actively market your blog, don't expect the numbers to go up all that much.

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  2. Maybe it's just because of the novelty factor that I managed to get about 30 FB friends to read it or something like that.
    I turned off my own clicks, otherwise that would have skewed the results too much. :)

    What kind of fight are you talking about ? Who can I fight with on a blog ?

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  3. I'm not really a Buddhist, though.

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  4. So you want to fight about that too ?! ;)

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  5. No. I have no objectins to being called a Buddhist.

    If you want to see a Buddhist shitstorm, though, see here.

    (N.b.: the author is very much on the side of the angels here. IMO of course.)

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  6. I'll read it after this... http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Developing-economies-lead-apf-1089086548.html?x=0
    Your 'friend' Stiglitz has something to say.

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  7. Long article. I'm not in the loop for Buddhist practices and politics, so can't comment on that, but I don't think there is any difference between the Buddhists and Christians, or Muslims or Jews, or Hindus... regarding how women are treated differently than men.

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  8. I think a particular problem among Buddhists is that there's a strong social pressure to be 'serene' and 'above it all' and not engage in 'unskilful speech.' That means that stuff gets swept under the rug a lot and then bubbles up in all kinds of twisted ways.

    By the way: I dropped the captcha from my site a few months back, and have only had to mod out one or two spam message since. IMO it's an unnecessary irritation, at least for low-traffic blogs.

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