December 22, 2014
Hit Counts: (Hits count!)
Crazyguyonabike (this web site) provides only one piece of information about whether anyone is reading the blog - and that is the total number of "hits" since the blog began. A "hit" is created when someone looks at any one page.
Because there is no use writing something unless people are reading it, we watch the hit count closely. To know how it is going day by day, we record the total each day, and then note how much it went up.
This time around, the total hits (as of today) are just over 37,000. That's not bad for a trip of just 24 cycling days. We always add some preliminary pages and some afterthought pages, and find a different pattern of hits for those, vs. for the main tour. For this trip, while we were cycling there were almost 1000 hits per day on average. And when not cycling, more like 150 hits per day.
Here are some of the conclusions we have drawn from looking at hits:
It is much more exciting to follow a tour while it is actually happening. Once a tour is over and becomes a part of history, many fewer people look at it. It's weird, because we all will gladly buy a book about a cycling adventure (or any other adventure), and we don't care that obviously the adventure has ended. But with blogs and computers, it has to be happening now!
Part of happening now is that people must see that an update to the blog has been posted. If the update is posted in the middle of the night, hits will suffer. That makes it harder when posting from outside North America. Since the language of the blogs is English, most readers (we suppose) will be from the US and Canada, with New Zealand, Australia, and the UK also in there.
During the ride, the daily hits can vary by 25% from day to day. We rather think that this is due to the time of day that each posting managed to go live. If on the other hand there is a prolonged hits slump during a ride, then we start to wonder if it is time to fall off the bike, or have something else dramatic happen!
In the chart below, you can clearly see when the actual ride began and ended. The fact that the hits drop so much the second the riding is over, means that there are not many people coming along and discovering the ride and reading about it over the longer term, as with a book.
| Heart | 0 | Comment | 0 | Link |
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 0 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |