Blaugust the 32nd: Did Blaugust Drive My Traffic?

Bwahahah! you thought, we were DONE, did you?

Way back on Blaugust the 10th, Ysharros asked the blogger's eternal question: Is this going to raise my pagehits? (I'm paraphrasing.) Someone, I can't figured out who, mentioned Syl had talked about sharing our stats, so that people don't feel like they're alone. [Syl clarified in the comments below.] As was pointed out, we're really all just small fish. So, I got 15,963 pagehits in August—several which I am sure were actual readers. As a contrast, I have a work friend who just started a blog about current events and biblical prophecy, and he's already getting 4k hits a day.

In case you're curious, my highest month ever is that first huge peak from September 2013, almost 17k and largely stemming from this post I did in late August of that year, in which I discussed barriers to entry and other economic concepts as they related to MMO revenue models. Digressing further, it's interesting what I got right and what I didn't in that post. As predicted (and I wasn't alone in this), The Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar were not the second coming of the subscription model—though it seems that Final Fantasy XIV may be. On the other hand, I was pretty sure I would never play or SWTOR ever again. And yet here I stand, having paid six more months of membership dues. And counting.

The second peak is May, just a few months ago, where I got about 16.6k as I was coming off of Developer Appreciation Week and got a bit of a boost (I think) from the Newbie Blogger Initiative. Don't feel bad if you're just starting out. You may note the cute little initial peak from July 2010 (the first month Google actually started counting, despite the graph beginning with May). In July 2010, after blogging for about 6 months, I got 997 pagehits, and in August I got only half that.

Following the Ancient Gaming Noob's lead (who I am sure gets waaaaay more hits than I), let's look at page referrals.

• Google tops the list, plus Google France and Germany, so lots of searching people are finding my stuff. (It just occurred to me, that may also include people coming from G+.)
• My own url is second, so a lot of people are just coming straight here, that's cool.
• Twitter's own shortener, t.co, is next, so that's a good place publicize my stuff.
• Feedly is, of course, a common RSS/Atom client, but it's nice to see that show up in my stats.
• Anook, social media for gamers and home of Blaugust, rounds out the the top five, perhaps the best indication that Blaugust as an organized event had an impact this past month (as opposed to the simple uptick in my posting).

Rounding out the top ten are Blessing of Kings (Rohan) and Inventory Full (Bhagpuss), so a special thanks to both of them and whoever is reading them in Canada and Germany. But note something interesting: all these sites account for only 887 of the almost 16k hits I got this month. Considering the lowest two sources on the list are only 27 apiece, that's a very long tail.

My graph is pretty jagged, even though there's a steady trend upward over the long term (about five years on the graph). While there are outliers, the biggest indicator of how many hits I get in a given month is how many times I post that month, sometimes adjusted for posting a lot at the end of the previous month. There's no real magic to it, to be honest. I don't know if I obsess about my stats more or less than the average blogger, or really where I stand in relative popularity. Going back partly to my post yesterday, I fall somewhere between extrovert and introvert. Popularity is nice, but my self worth doesn't depend on it. And I am happy with the few gamers and bloggers I surround myself with in my little corner of internet.

And with that, I put Blaugust 2015 to bed on this blog.

~~~~~~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.