Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Assessing My Audience

Every so often I'll look at my page view list assessing how many people read this blog and their countries of origin. I'm perplexed. When I ceased to write in 2012 this blog showed about ten thousand page views a month, not Drudge type viewing but not bad. Then, beginning in September of '13 when I resumed writing it didn't take long for the number of page views to jump back into the big time. I thought, "My audience missed me. I MUST be good". Two months ago I was receiving over six hundred page views daily. "Wow", my mind said, "I'm up for a Pulitizer". It was then that I looked at my audience profiles. There were days when I was getting more viewership from China than in the United States. It wasn't unusual for three hundred hits from their mainland citizenry. Could it be that a giant conglomerate wanted the rights to my site? Well, almost as soon as that began it was over with the ChiComs. Yesterday I checked in again to see what was happening:
The USA led the way with 580. I don't even know what 580 means. Is it for a week, a month, a decade? Sweden came next with 90. My vision of a young Elke Sommer reading MJH sent chills up my spine. Sweden was followed by Kyrgyzstan with 53. On this one I am perplexed. I know countries and where they are but not Kyrgyzstan. Out came the map. Did you know the government of, and I don't want to spell it anymore, is the most corrupt in the world. It was a part of the old Soviet Union. What country in Euro/Asia wasn't? So, who from that part of the world would read this column? I envisioned a fifteen year old kid standing on a hillside tending his goats. In one hand he held the bladder of a sheep while drinking rancid water and in the other hand he held an iPad.  I used to receive a number of viewers from South America but there are so many government protests and revolutions going on centering around the lack of toilet paper they don't have much time for me. Priorities are important: leaves or paper.
I'll be blunt. I'm down to around 150-200 day, hardly worth the time to write. A normal person would credit his family for this number but I don't have much family so that can't be it. The only aspect left is that, by accident, people stumble onto the blog using google or bing. I can live with that. I only write as a hobby, anyway, so my feelings aren't that hurt, you rotten, corruptible losers.

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