After two years of blogging, I have completely given up trying to predict what blogposts I make will bring in the most viewers (and hence, potential advertising revenue). It’s a puzzle to me. I have written posts which I figure will bring in lots of readers, only to find them languishing when I later check my statistics on WordPress.
And then, I have blogposts like Meet the Man Who Has Lost 200 Pounds Playing Beat Saber in VR. I literally threw this together as an update on a story that was fairly widely reported almost exactly one year ago, about a man, Robert Long, who credited Beat Saber (along with diet changes and other exercise) with helping him lose a significant amount of weight.
I posted the story, because I found it inspiring, and then forgot about it. Imagine my surprise when I came back the next day to discover that it had caused a significant spike in my readership:
Over three days, the post racked up 9,492 views! On August 7th, my blog had a total of 6,084 views, completely blowing my previous record of 4,594 views out of the water (which I talked about here). That blogpost is now, unaccountably, the most-popular post on my blog, with a grand total of 9,947 views to date. Almost 10,000 views in only ten days!
And see that second, lower red arrow in the diagram above? It’s pointing to Google News, which send a ton of referral traffic to my blog! I had absolutely no idea that my blog would even show up on Google News as a news source! I’d never seen anything like it before.
So now you know why I say I can’t predict what is going to be popular. It’s a black box, a complete mystery to me!
It seems like most people aren’t geek 🙂 they are interested in their look and weight or freebie clothing. But I find your articles fascinating with all those virtual worlds, some of them I didn’t even know of.