Blaugust 2019 Wrapup, Part 3 – Statistics
641 words.
The Blog
Here I present the reason you should never pay attention to statistics when blogging. My views actually went down during Blaugust 2018, and went down even more during Blaugust 2019.
Views and Visitors
I also offer this chart as evidence that the “you have to blog every day to build an audience” advice is completely obsolete. Blogging every day is strictly for fun and/or personal growth. Building an audience is accomplished by networking, and is largely unrelated to the content you produce. As always in life, it’s never what you know, it’s who you know.
Of course when we chart WordPress Likes and Comments, it’s a totally different story.
Likes
Comments
I’m not an expert on blog traffic statistics, but from these numbers I would conclude that the “views” chart is mostly a product of Google searches from random strangers, more-or-less the potential to reach a new audience, while the Likes and Comments charts are the result of individual returning readers who stop by on a daily basis.
The Channel
In case anyone out there is still confused about why people switch from making high-quality videos on YouTube to livestreaming terrible quality videos on Twitch or anywhere else, here are a few numbers from my recent livestreams.
Steam Backlog Bonanza livestream views. Terrible for PewDiePie, but great for me.
I don’t know if anyone will be able to read those numbers on whatever device you’re reading this on, but the individual views on the top 10 livestreams are: 49, 16, 15, 13, 12, 10, 10, 9, 8, 8, or a total of 150.
For comparison, here are some numbers from the Bloodborne series I just finished uploading during Blaugust.
That’s 14, 7, 6, 6, 6, 6, 5, 5, 5, and the next one not shown is 4, for a total of 64 on the top 10 Bloodborne videos.
And for even more comparison and perhaps most damning of all, here are some numbers from the Sekiro videos I uploaded in June, a very popular recent game that surely should have garnered a lot more search attention than Bloodborne.
That’s 11, 8, 8, 7, 6, 6, 6, 5, and 4 and 4 on the next two not shown, for a total of 65 on the top 10 Sekiro videos.
I slaved over those Bloodborne and Sekiro videos, making sure they were the highest possible video and audio quality. My Bloodborne series is probably the best I’ve ever done, once you get past a few technical glitches at the beginning from recording PS4 gameplay for the first time. The numbers for those videos are actually pretty good in comparison to previous videos, because I’m usually lucky to get 1 or 2 views on new uploads. Almost all of my YouTube views come from searches, years later.
But I did almost no work on those livestream videos. They are far worse quality. I literally just sat down in a chair, pressed the “start streaming” button, played for more-or-less an hour, then walked away. And those view numbers are astounding. 49 views in a month for an obscure MMO? And most of those were in the first week? What the what?
It’s no wonder everyone blew off making Let’s Play videos and switched to livestreaming. Consumers who demand quality in their content consumption are apparently a dying breed.
I’ll end with my YouTube channel analytics “overview” page for 2019 so far.
It’s hard to read much into that line graph but it seems to be trending upward, and it seems slightly improved during the Steam Backlog Bonanza and Blaugust. The channel has been very, very slowly gaining an audience since I started it, but the growth seems to be accelerating ever so slightly.
But for some reason people still really like my Morrowind videos. Go figure. Someday I need to finish that game.
Archived Comments
Wilhelm Arcturus 2019-09-04T15:09:14Z
“I also offer this chart as evidence that the “you have to blog every day to build an audience” advice is completely obsolete. Blogging every day is strictly for fun and/or personal growth. Building an audience is accomplished by networking, and is largely unrelated to the content you produce.”
Drawing this conclusion from the data set of a single blog seems flawed. If I look at my own stats, I wrote 30% more posts than I did in July and received a traffic boost over the 20% mark. Looking year over year I am down for August, but I am down for every month year over year and have been on that trend since 2013. Looking within the context of each year, August is always an uptick.
So, I am wrong, are you wrong, or is there insufficient data?
My general opinion is that there is a regular readership that changes very slowly over time. The same 100 or so people visit my blog regularly. Everything else is pretty much up to the whims of Google or random links in various forums. That is generally related to what topic I am on about rather than quantity of posts though, for example, writing a lot about WoW Classic in August, clearly the hot topic of the month, drove more traffic to me from Google both via the fact I wrote about it and that I wrote about it frequently.
I would contend that a regular schedule of posting is still helpful in building an audience, but that the topics you choose matter as well.
UltrViolet 2019-09-04T17:14:26Z I realize now that I was referring to one of my pet theories that I don’t think I’ve ever actually written down before. The “write every day to build an audience” advice has always bugged me because I feel like it was invented back in the days when people had to visit a blog’s web site every day from a bookmark and/or hit refresh to see new posts, before RSS feeds or social media or any kind of automatic notification systems. There’s a lot less danger of “forgetting” about a blog in this day and age, it seems to me, but I still see a lot of “write every day” blogging advice without much reasoning for why. Writing every day is very helpful for building writing skills and for many other things, but I just don’t buy it as a primary marketing tool anymore. But you’re right, I don’t have any real data to base that on, just a hunch. :)
bhagpuss 2019-09-04T18:51:08Z
I think in blogging it’s what you write about more than who you know. Your regular readers will check in for most posts to see what you’re banging on about this time but the big upticks come from being linked somewhere with a lot of traffic and the bulk of extra views each month come from random searches. Clearly, if you write about the latest hotness you will be more likely to be linked and also pick up more random search views.
Blaugust is also weird for stats. At the beginning everyone reads everything but after a couple of weeks fatigue sets in. I know i wasn’t making it through every post every day towards the end and i bet not many people were. If you posted every day in November or March you might see a difference.
Also, you largely followed a very regular pattern, with posts that were very similar in them and format. I personally read and enjoyed every post - I even bought one of the games on your sort-of recommendation. I can imagine, though, that after a while some readers will have felt they’d seen enough and started to skip.
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