Let's Talk About Blogger

Yes, let's. I've been doing this thing for well over a decade now. I go through fits and starts but I have tried to keep it up. To an extent it gives me some sort of purpose. A bit trite but it is the truth.

I like to think that someone is actually reading it. It's nice to have some motivation and a bit of feedback. A nice number of hits always helps. So every now and again I check my stats.

If it isn't clear, about ten percent of my hits have happened in the last month. The traffic is wild. The last three months has about 15% of my total hits and about 20% over the last six months. Blogger is a little ambiguous about where the hits are coming from, in the form of referers, but 99% are from sources with less than seven hits. So picking a figure that is anywhere from about 40,000 to 100,000 different sites. There is a bulge in the middle of the stat line. 

For point of clarity during that peak I was posting every day and posting elsewhere to boost my stats. Right now it's a few times a week. Whilst I haven't done the numbers, I would estimate that the average is below that over the last six months.

As much as I would like to think this sudden popularity is down to a decade of hard work, I tend to think it's not that. So what then? Is something I have done blowing up? It's a blog mostly about painting little plastic and metal men, so I guess not.

Comments are something that seems to be missing. As the majority seem to be coming from Google. Something like 95%, my guess is that this is down to to its down to AI and specifically Google's AI overview. 

So is this a good thing or a bad thing? As I am not making any money from it I would say it's a bad one. Joking aside, I am being referenced in some way and I assume that someone, somewhere is being given information from the blog. Like I say this is a blog mostly about painting little plastic and metal men. A well written an insightful blog (shem 🙄) but it's still about nothing much. So I start to wonder.

Maybe the internet is now totally dead and everything AI is keeping it on life support. I would say that it's nothing major but it takes power, water and a metric fudge ton of money. Don't get me wrong, I would be happy to work for any AI. The pay can't be any worse. I just don't see this ending well, I really don't.