Are more people reading blogs?
I’m noticing a really interesting trend going on with my blog stats lately. I’ve only updated seven times in January, which is very much below average for me. However, in a few hundred visitors time, this month will see the second highest number of visitors-per-month ever since my blog’s inception in 2004 — beaten only by August 2008, when I was receiving an obscene amount of visitors each day during the Beijing Olympics. Already, the number of average daily visitors is only six fewer than during August 2008, which is pretty impressive (to me, anyway). It was only two years ago that I was very lucky to receive ten visitors per day to the blog… and most of these probably accidentally stumbled on the blog and then quickly moved on.
And This Is What I Think doesn’t get a huge amount of traffic by any stretch of the information. Whilst some bloggers measure visitors by number of thousands, this blog is finally at the point where it’s common to have eighty or so people come by each day, and not unusual to see numbers in the hundreds notch up on the little graph on my dashboard. Considering the fact that I don’t really put that much effort in to the blog, I’m pretty happy. It would be nice to have a prettier blog or a more interesting blog, but I don’t have the time nor skills nor money to do so… and plus, I’m quite happy with it as it is. I’m glad this isn’t my fulltime job, and I’m not constantly (or ever!) expected to come up with the gold. I’m also happy that little increases in traffic are still exciting.
The visitor counter is fast approaching 25,000 visitors since moving to WordPress in October 2007. It feels like just yesterday that I racked up my 1,000th visitor over at Blogger, and even more recently that 10,000 ticked over here at WordPress. It’s pretty awesome that around 40,000 visitors in total have peered in to my life over the past five years. Considering the fact that the blog is a random hobby I began on a whim, I’ve got to be happy with that!
