To me it seems like a lot of people. Maybe I'm not convinced because, ironically, creating the blog has turned out to be a surprisingly lonely experience. Or perhaps not so surprising -- it's writing after all -- but still, I started out wanting to spark passionate, witty exchanges, to be a voice among voices. It didn't happen.
I saw pretty quickly some of the things I wasn't doing to make it happen -- I wasn't writing shorter, lighter, more newsy, issuing challenges, asking questions, playing games, inventing contests, making "best of" lists -- oh, & did I mention, I wasn't interacting much myself (as in, for instance, regularly looking at or posting in the blogs of my peers)? Frankly, I wasn't really hustling the thing. I decided it took too much time to gather the photos & write the posts to do all the other stuff. I finally just accepted the blog for what it is -- my voice talking to anyone who wants to listen (& missing the voices that don't talk back).
Early on, I did figure out how to install Sitemeter, a free web counter. Here's a few stats from there about my blog:
- Readers by country -- U.S., 50%; U.K., 17%; Germany,4%; Canada, 4%. The other 25% is divided among 16 countries (5% are unknown).
- Language in which blog is read -- English, 68%; German, 9%; Italian, 5%; Spanish. 4%; Portuguese, 3%. There are 12 other languages listed , including Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Hebrew & Latvian.
- Average number of page views per day -- 251
- Average number of page views per visitor -- 1.5
- Average amount of time spent on blog: 44 seconds
For me perhaps the most amazing stat is that the overwhelming majority of recorded visitors apparently spend no time on the blog. That's right, 0.0 seconds. How is this possible? How can they decide they don't have any interest in a page in less than a second? Perhaps they're flipping quickly looking for porn.
I'm intrigued by the people who stay 10, 15, 25 minutes, an hour, reading & clicking around through numerous pages. Who are they? Well, for one thing they're mostly from outside the U.S. Why? I don't know. Good question though.
Speaking of porn (softcore artsy), the favotite destination on my site for everybody by a wide margin is my post titled Ryan McGinley: Building a youthsex brand (it's astonishing BTW how many people type "youthsex" or "youth sex" into google). Most people get to this post via the picture above, which I assume they find in google image searches.
I wonder. Will Sitemeter spike tomorrow as the boys (& maybe even the girls) come cruising from Florida & the Ukraine, Vancouver & Dubai, Seoul & Argentina to see this bathtub full of naked kids?
God, we're a horny species.
2 comments:
Congrats! If nothing else, it says there are people out here interested in what you're thinking.
That's a lot. And it's a well-known marketing issue that the majority of people don't bother to say anything. I have no idea what you do about it, other than accept it.
I read something recently that said to end every post on a question that had a straight-forward answer. That would theoretically bring out the readers because they'd be hitting "post comment" before they had a chance to think about it. No idea if it works, though!
I'm one of your foreigners! ;)
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