Blaugust Clean-up
Thank god that’s over. Nothing quite like getting into the spirit of blogging by burning yourself out with thirty-one daily posts.
I’m halfway kidding.
It was a fun experiment, but I’m doubtful that I’ll participate next year. While there is still some possibility of long-tail shenanigans, my mid-month analysis seems correct:
The numbers, minus the numbers.
In other words, in terms of pageviews and visitors, daily posting still resulted in 10% less views than the peak in May. Which, incidentally, was a month that saw eleven (11) posts. Perhaps that is not quite as fair a comparison given how August is certainly 16% higher than both June and July. Then again, I posted 11 and 13 times in those months, respectively. Talk about diminishing returns.
The thing that is up rather markedly are comments:
Probably the better blogging indicator.
As I mused two weeks ago, I am not entirely sure whether the uptick in comments is due to the shotgun effect – more posts makes it more likely you post something people want to talk about – or from the nature of the Blaugust event itself, or a complete coincidence, or what. The thing I do know is that pageviews are one thing, but comments can actually challenge your arguments, change your worldview, and even comfort you with camaraderie. All things I definitely appreciate.
Not worth posting daily for that though, Christ.
Anyway, I have a birthday and Metal Gear Solid 5 to enjoy this week. So, see you… maybe Thursday. Or whenever the hell I feel like it.
*sigh* Feels good to say that again.
Posted on September 1, 2015, in Commentary and tagged Analyst, Blaugust, Comments, Pageviews, Stats. Bookmark the permalink. 5 Comments.
In An Age 
Sorry about your pageviews but I mostly read your blog via the relevant RSS feed and I open the actual page only if I want to comment or something like that.
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Ha, I’m not actually concerned with that. I actually do the same thing via Feedly.
It brings up a good point though: do RSS feeds count as anything? Or subscriptions of any sort? Part of what made this experiment interesting was that I thought doubling the posting schedule should double the sub views at a minimum. Around 50 people are subbed via WordPress for example, so at a minimum, 20 extra posts should be +1000 views, right? That doesn’t seem to be what’s going on though. Which means that perhaps pageviews are indeed a bad metric of engagement and comments are king.
Speaking of which… thanks for your comment. :)
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Come on, do some REAL statistics! :) Number of comments? Really? You should do #comments / #posts to see if the extra comment spike is “real”. Or maybe #pageviews / #comments, to see if the added viewing activity actually translates to interaction. Or maybe #pageviews / #posts… are you approaching the saturation point, where people start ignoring your posts because you post too much!
So much insignificant….sorry I mean absolutely important information you could get out of this!! :)
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Hmm. The comment/post ratio was 5.16 per post in August, compared to 10.07 in July. But that might have been an outlier, as June was 6.27. As for pageview/comment, August was ~54, July was ~55, and June was ~104. That last one is a bit of a weird metric though, as presumably a lower ratio is better, but you can arrive at that with lower pageviews rather than necessarily more engagement.
In terms of pageviews/post, this experiment gets hosed: June and July are literally twice as high as August, and May is ~3 times better.
As with my discussion with Alex F above though, it’s becoming a bit more clear that WordPress stats have to be taken with a huge grain of salt. It doesn’t seem like Feedly and other RSS feeders count as pageviews, for example. Which makes sense in some respects, but makes the entire exercise in tracking stats somewhat (more) pointless in my mind.
Comments and inter-blog
flame-warsdiscussion are king.LikeLike
The only way to really rack up comments is to either have a few people going back and forth on a topic on your blog, or to write ‘comment-bait’ junk like “Which WoW class should I play now?” or “What server is the best?”. The first is good, the second is Buzzfeed-level garbage.
As for views/visits, I think WP stats aren’t very accurate in terms of totals, but they aren’t terrible for trending, at least until WP decides to change how they count a visit/view again, or Google decides to knock you down a peg to remind you they do indeed run the world.
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