Visitors who do not publish blogs of their own may not be aware that in the background "Blogger" provides bloggers with surprisingly comprehensive and up-to-date stats about how their blogs are doing. For example, you can find out your league table of visits by country. You can also find out the number of "hits" your top twenty blogposts had in the last twenty four hours. In addition, you can see tracking graphs and suchlike.
By the way, most of my visitors during the past six months reside in the USA, far outnumbering both Hong Kong and Great Britain who are second and third respectively on my list. For several years, Great Britain and the USA were running neck and neck but not any more. In the last thirty days, "Yorkshire Pudding" has attracted 107,000 visits from America alone.
It sometimes bemuses me which blogposts appear in my 24 hour list and after twenty years of regular blogging I find I had totally forgotten many of those posts. It can almost be like reading the ramblings of a complete stranger. For example this old post received fifty four readers yesterday. I wrote it on March 10th 2020 just before Great Britain went into its first COVID-19 lockdown. I guess it is a little piece of history now.
Every blogpost I have published in the past year has received over two hundred visits. However, some posts have attracted considerably more people. My "Quiztime" posts have been particularly fruitful with some of these receiving four or five hundred visitors. Posts that have been titled "Poem" are much less popular which is somewhat discouraging I must say even though I am well aware that poetry is not everybody's cup of tea.
In the past few days, I have noticed something weird happening with my visitor stats. My "Malton" post of August 20th has received 1098 visits, my "Slaithwaite" post from Monday night has attracted over seven hundred visits and yesterday's Beatles "Quiztime" has achieved a massive 1418 visitors already.
I am very suspicious of these recent figures. They are way out of sync with my usual visitor pattern. However, it is pretty much impossible to report such an issue to "Blogger" which seems to have been designed with a well-constructed invisible barrier in place to deter questions, suggestions and complaints from users.
Please don't imagine that I am in any way obsessed with the stats that "Blogger" provides because I am not. It is just that occasionally I like to have a look at them to see what is going on behind the scenes.
I have had over 5331 visits to my black bucket post so far today. I don't take the stats seriously.
ReplyDeleteIt seems there are bots, or AI, out and about, leaving pretend comments for websites. Perhaps that is the increase in visits. Not sure.
ReplyDeleteSurprising that visitors from the USA outnumber the UK.
ReplyDeleteThat is interesting. It surprised me that your second highest was Hong Kong which has approximately one tenth the population of the UK.
ReplyDeleteI have noticed my post views have rocketed going from about 200 views to averaging 600 views, could it be blogger playing up again.
ReplyDeleteI'm like you. I'm not obsessed by the numbers, I just find them interesting.
ReplyDeleteIt's probably just that Vlad fellow manipulating stats again.
ReplyDeleteI read on another blog recently that those jumps are caused by AI searching through posts for certain topics. Not sure if that is true, though.
ReplyDeleteOne word -- BOTS.
ReplyDeleteBrazil in 4th place, Hong Kong 6th and Vietnam 9th have been responsible for a significant volume of the traffic to my blog over the last few months. Like you, I struggle to take the stats seriously .
ReplyDeleteMine usually seem to increase at the end of each month.
ReplyDeleteI am like you too. I don't really look at numbers, but it is in fact interesting to see where some of the views were from.
ReplyDeleteI used to look at stats. Not any more. Whatever my posts get is what they get.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure the stats really mean anything, or that comparing them across time matters. If Google tweaks the way it measures hits, for example, that could throw the numbers off. Like you I look at them very rarely out of curiosity but I don't set much store by them.
ReplyDeleteI've also heard what others have said above, that some higher recent hit counts might be bots or AI scrapers. (I think I saw that on someone else's blog, so maybe you saw it too!)
Do you suppose that it is AI language learning model mining your posts? Blueberry yogurt!
ReplyDeleteWill Jay