Last year, I said “Blogging may be a stagnant backwater of the internet these days” but something definitely changed since then as new platforms have blossomed, drawing many “mainstream” writers into blogging. They’re mostly careful not to call it blogging, of course. Mere “blogging” is tired and old-fashioned and so utterly Plebeian, so their shiny new Substack sites can’t be mere “blogs” … but if it walks like a blog and quacks like a blog …
I used to publish annual traffic statistics, but the plug-in I had been using since 2009 blew up spectacularly — knocking the site offline for more than 24 hours — so I no longer have anything like a continuous data series to draw on. Over the last few years, I was regularly clocking in between one and two million “hits” in a year, but as you’d expect a significant portion of those were automated bots rather than actual human beings. Other than visitors who come here from other blogs, most of my traffic these days comes by way of various social media sites like Gab and MeWe. I used to get a fair number of visits from Twitter, but my Twitter traffic has been dwindling down to almost nothing in recent years (perhaps reflecting the decreasing diversity of viewpoints allowed on that platform).
Earlier anniversary postings:
- Sixteenth anniversary
- Fifteenth anniversary
- Fourteenth anniversary
- Thirteenth anniversary
- Twelfth anniversary
- Eleventh anniversary
- Tenth anniversary
- Ninth anniversary
- Eighth anniversary
- Seventh anniversary
- Sixth anniversary
Unfortunately, the first five years of postings — when I was merely a freeloading tenant on Jon P’s site … and eventually consuming some 90+% of his paid bandwidth and storage — aren’t accessible any more, at least I haven’t been able to get access for quite some time:
- (Very belated) Fifth anniversary
- (Premature) Fourth anniversary (a few days later, I welcomed my 150,000th visitor)
- Third anniversary
- (Belated) Second anniversary
- First anniversary
