Eighteen years ago, blogging was already “a thing” and everyone and their sainted mother was starting a blog. The availability of low-cost and even free blogging sites encouraged a lot of people to create a blog of their own and many of them quickly discovered that they didn’t have a lot to say after the first few dozen posts. About five years later, the supply of new blogs starting was trending well below the number of bloggers hanging up the keyboard and shuttering their sites. The rise of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter took even more attention away from what once was a thriving online community. Some old-time bloggers like Iowahawk made the transition to social media very naturally and these days his follower count on Twitter is quickly surpassing almost every major community in Iowa the United States: “Update: 219,350 followers, now the 103rd largest town in the USA #SuckItTacoma #YoureNextSanBernardino”
I noted last year that the staple phrase “Blogging is a stagnant backwater of the internet these days” is still pretty accurate but Substack continues to grow and attract really good writers to its platform. They’re very careful not to call it mere blogging, of course: blogging is tired and old-fashioned and they had to knap their own flint … so not like the cool kids at Substack.
Annual traffic statistics aren’t included in these annual posts any more because 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 lot of those were bots rather than actual human visitors. I’ve seen a slight uptick in traffic from Twitter in the last few weeks, but not really enough to qualify as significant (perhaps the possible Elon Musk take-over has reduced the shadow bans so many conservative and libertarian accounts were subject to).
Earlier anniversary postings:
- Seventeenth anniversary
- 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
