It’s amazing what a little ol’ presidential debate can do for an obscure blog’s visitor stats. With Romney and Obama together on national TV last night and the cameras giving us mostly close-up shots, viewers had plenty of time to notice the candidates’ lapel pins. For the first time, apparently, many noticed “something” on Mitt Romney’s lapel pin and as it happened, yours truly had two posts on the subject. What luck.
Look what happened to my stats for yesterday:
Sort of blew the roof off my Freshly Pressed blip back in August (Week 33), along with everything else in the quiet history of Pied Type:
Sorry, but I’m sort of a stat whore and I was stunned by this. I could not believe the thousands — thousands — of hits that rolled in last night, almost all of them during the 2-3 hours of the debate coverage. My thanks to every one of those visitors.
Is that around 7,000 hits? Excellent! Isn’t it fun when something goes hot and the hits just keep changing every time you refresh the screen.
It’s actually a little over 31,000!
I think most bloggers on WP are lucky to get to 5 to 20 visitors a day (no way of distinguishing return IPs on WP Stats of course), with a good days, based on, say, 3 views per visitor, for an average of 60 views a day. It’s a typically thankless exercise, so if a blogger wants a friend, best get a dog, as the saying goes. Page views in thousands are something that bloggers can only hallucinate about. Which is why most of them quit after a year, or so, peter down, peter, peter, lights out. Am I wrong about what I surmise are typical stats?
This particularly day was totally freakish, as you can see from the graphs. I’ve no idea what the average views per day might be for the average blog. There are so many blogs out there, with some insanely popular and many we’ll never hear about. You raise an interesting question, however. Would I have kept blogging if I weren’t getting any visitors? I don’t know. I’ve always contended that this blog is mostly for just for me, a hobby incorporating all the things I’m interested in — art, writing, layout, computers and the Internet. I’m pretty sure I’d keep doing it regardless. Visitors are just the frosting on the cake. But just in case … yes, I have a dog too.