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🌱 2023 State of the Blog

Assumed Audience: Folks interested in the details of having an extremely small blog. How it feels, what traffic looks like, and the early process of finding an audience.

I started this blog on June 21st 2021, with the first post hitting your screens on the 23rd. Thanks to Goatcounter, a slightly more privacy-aware analytics system, I have some numbers I can use to reflect on the last two and a half years.

For starters, here’s what Goatcounter can tell me:

  • How many views each page got each day
  • Where those views navigated from (e.g. the homepage, Google, unknown, etc. Depends on if the referring site passes referral info in the URL)
  • For all the visitors that day, the percentage breakdown across:
    • countries
    • languages
    • browsers
    • OSes
    • device sizes (laptop vs phone level of granularity)

Unlike Google analytics, I cannot look at things from a user session perspective. So I can’t say “this user in Russia came from Yandex to the homepage and then looked at these 3 posts for 30 seconds each.” Instead the most I can say is “20% of my visitors for the day were in Russia. 15% of homepage views were referred by Yandex. And also these 3 posts got traffic from the homepage.” I think this is a good balance: enough data for me to understand my audience without tracking readers’ every movement. Let me know your thoughts, but in the meantime, let’s cover:

  • My goals when I started blogging
  • How I feel about these goals now
  • For each year since I started:
    • How regularly did I post?
    • How much traffic did the site get?
    • What were the top 3 blog posts?
    • How did people find this blog? And finally: what’s top of mind for next year

my goals

When I started blogging, I had four questions:

  1. Will this help me think more clearly?
  2. Will this help me write better?
  3. Will I get feedback on my ideas? Will that improve my thinking and writing?
  4. How long can I stay anonymous for?

After 2.5 years I’ve found:

  1. It’s an opportunity for structured thinking that I haven’t had in a while. I don’t think I’m regular enough to improve “clarity” of thought when I’m not writing. But it does increase the number of times I think through something semi-rigorously. And that’s directionally what I wanted.
  2. No. But I think it’s too early to see improvement. Right now, I want low barriers to publishing in service of thinking practice. As I establish a consistent writing practice, I can focus on this more. That aside, the lack of improvement is partially lack of writing and perhaps partially…
  3. I haven’t gotten significant feedback on my ideas, which is understandable. I’ve done a few things to get feedback, the most granular of which was a small feedback circle I started with a few other bloggers. But as my writing frequency decreased, that flywheel stopped as well.
    • Conversation is also slower on blogs. Most conversation still happens on social media because it’s friction-less. As easy as I’ve made replying to my posts, few-to-none have done it yet. And how often do I see meaningful replies to other peoples’ posts via web mentions?
    • LLMs could be an interesting tool for feedback, but there are pitfalls there as well, including how to access one anonymously? Which leads us to…
  4. Anonymity is fascinatingly difficult. It’s easier to get eyes and ears and ideas from friends who are already invested in you. When you start anonymous, you start from 0, which takes much longer (I suspect). Additionally, there’s the issue of de-anonymiz-ability. How much information about myself do I want to put out there? After a few years, could someone put enough blog posts together to recognize me? And am I okay with that? What tools can I use if I can’t pay in an anonymous way?

the numbers

Let’s start with me: blog_chart_2023.png

I didn’t commit internally to a publishing schedule and it shows. It’s been almost a year since my last post. However, I am impressed to find that I’ve written 89 posts in the last 2.5 years, with an average of 500 words per post. Despite not writing for 10 months, that still comes out to almost 3 posts a month if I’d scheduled them!

Some more fun facts:

The largest post is 🌳 how I publish my Zettelkasten at 2,250 words and the smallest is 🗨️ Northrop Grumman wins a contract to build astronaut homes orbiting the moon with only 1 word!

I published the most 🌰 posts with 15,437 words across 33 posts. 🌱 and 🌳 both contain 9k+ words, though the former is spread over 16 posts and the latter only 6. I have not yet written my first 🌲 post.

Okay, now let’s talk traffic. If you just want a quick summary, I recommend skipping to “putting it all together”:

2021

In the first 6 months after I created this blog, the site got 154 visits. While 44% of that traffic is from unknown origin, 15% came from Twitter (mostly me sharing my posts) and 3% from Google.

At this point, I was only sharing my posts on Twitter with reasonable payoff– it was the largest known referrer.

My top two1 posts were:

  1. 🌳 Ethereum is Killing Your Startup with 41 views
    • While 51% of the views came from an unknown source, it looks like only 2% came from the homepage. Most of the known traffic came from Twitter or Telegram.
    • Also interesting to note that this page did not seem to drive many readers to the homepage. 77% of the homepage views are untraceable. But none of the traceable views were referred from this post.
  2. 🌳 Flow with 4 views
    • All views in this case came from the homepage.

One interesting fact: only 45% of visits came from phones or small tablets. The rest came from large tablets or computers of some kind. I do most of my reading on mobile, and I suspect most of the average reader does too, so that surprised me. Do fewer people read on their phones than I think? Is my blog less mobile-friendly than I think?

2022

In 2022, we had 1170 visits, 47% from unknown origin and roughly 15% from me sharing links to social platforms like Twitter, Discord, etc. I also submitted the blog (or relevant blog posts) to appropriate communities, blogrolls, and aggregators. You can see a list of such options on the about page. But in terms of visible traffic, the 512KB Club and the 1MB Club each brought roughly 3% of reads to the site. Submitting relevant blog posts to the Indieweb (via IndieNews, IndieBlog, etc) was responsible for ~4% of views.

By now, I was actively sharing posts wherever I felt made sense. And while the traffic numbers suggest people read what I posted, very few substantive conversations resulted from it.

Top four2 posts/pages:

  1. 🌳 how I publish my Zettelkasten with 113 views
    • I shared this the most widely: in the Obsidian discord, IndieNews, and so on.
  2. 🛠️ quicksidian - 75 views
    • This only got shared in the Obsidian discord (and 75% of its traffic came from there). But it still got lots of traffic from the homepage (16%) and IndieWeb somehow (3%). Only 7% of the traffic to this page was from an unknown source.
  3. Pathfinder - 52 views
    • This project is still in stealth(ish) mode on the website, though I’ve shared it broadly within crypto contexts. It’s a collaborative poetry art piece on the blockchain currently on the test net.
  4. ❔ will Google’s self-importance be its downfall - 40 views
    • This is another post I shared with the Indieweb with strong results– 27% of traffic came from there. Comparatively: 55% of traffic is anonymous and 21% came from the homepage.

Again, like the previous six months, 44% of traffic came from phones and small tablets.

2023

In the second year of this blog’s existence there were 647 visits to the website. Note that at this point, I was not promoting the blog myself too much. I shared some links on Mastodon and Twitter, though Twitter usage shrank dramatically this year.

In this year of pause, the highest referrer to the site was yandex.ru, the Russian search engine at 12%3. 4% of traffic went specifically from yandex.ru to 🌰 random poetry generator. Apparently there are 28 Russian poetry enthusiasts that Yandex was happy to connect with that little tool. I hope they enjoyed playing with it!

The 512KB and 1MB clubs combined were responsible for 10% of views and Google, surprisingly, sent 5% of readers. I guess the algorithm finally decided I wasn’t spam.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my top 3 posts were:

  1. 🌳 how I publish my Zettelkasten - 35 views
    • 43% came from Google! 17% unknown and 26% from me submitting the post to aggregators/webmentions on a relevant blog, etc.
  2. 🌰 random poetry generator - 30 views
    • 93% from yandex.ru
  3. 🗨️ we must abandon growth to truly thrive - 21 views
    • 57% from the homepage, 19% unknown, 14% my blog being submitted to IndieBlog, 10% Google.

(In case you were curious: 42% of readers were on their phones/small tablets.)

putting it all together

Over the last 2.5 years, here’s how it comes together:

so what does any of this mean

Here are a few things I’ve learned from this experience so far:

  1. Intrinsic benefits from blogging are the most important.
    • While it makes sense that my blog is too new to seed much conversation, the possibility for conversation is the primary difference between a file on my computer and a file on the web. That said: it can’t be the primary motivator for a new blog. Focusing on the other benefits will likely be more motivating. (And, frankly, are more likely to be positive. We all know that attention on the internet can be the worst.)
  2. One “popular enough” article gets you in the door with search engines.
    • Looking at the traffic, I suspect 🌳 how I publish my Zettelkasten proved to Google that I wasn’t spam. And now Google sends traffic (albeit tiny amounts) to other posts of mine as well.
    • Again, I haven’t dug into the day-by-day numbers enough to prove this hypothesis. But Yandex also sends traffic to more than my poetry post.
    • Worth calling out that my traffic is super low. When I say “2% of views from the last 2.5 years came from Google”, I’m talking 42 entire views.
  3. Sharing your blog with philosophically-aligned communities and aggregators is a valuable way to get your blog in front of people.
    • “Organic” searches on Google and Yandex combined are responsible for 6% of known reads. Me sharing my work on social media or with specific communities or blogrolls, by contrast, account for 17%.
    • Even just submitting your blog to like-minded blogrolls can be powerful. 7% of known reads in the last 2.5 years have come from submitting my blog to the 512KB and 1MB clubs. Again, that’s slightly more than “organic” searches.
    • (This makes me wonder how much of the 44% unknown traffic over the last 2.5 years is coming from other blogrolls, search engines, and aggregators without attribution.)
  4. Either more people read on their laptops than I thought or there’s something specific about my content or format that appeals more to folks on a laptop? Would love to hear thoughts on this.

thoughts for the future

Here’s what I’d like to see from myself in 2024:

  • writing more frequently
    • The reason I’m not publishing more frequently is because I haven’t been writing as frequently. I’ve spent less time on my personal computer in the last year, in part because I spend so many working hours on a computer. I’ll need to brainstorm what an ideal version of this looks like.
  • fewer internal expectations on sharing
    • I will continue sharing snippets where appropriate, but I will no longer expect conversation to arise from it.
    • I’d like to add attribution to links I share to Mastodon, just so I can track the effectiveness of that medium compared to past!Twitter.
    • I also may choose to stop sharing altogether, just to focus on the intrinsic value of blogging 🤔.

Digging into and documenting my numbers like this is fun. It gives me the opportunity to look back on what resonated with folks, think critically about where people like me spend time on the internet, and re-assess how I spend my time. If there are other angles you’d like to hear a tiny blogger reflect on, let me know!

Info:

  1. Too many posts tied for third, so I won’t discuss any of them. ↩

  2. Pathfinder is more of a project than a post, so I’ll list top 4 instead of just the top 3. ↩

  3. unknown at 39%, next highest was Yandex. ↩

Don't want to do that? @ me on twitter or mastodon

Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.