Disappearing readers

Whither my readers?

Next month, we celebrate the eleventh anniversary of the Founding of this blog.  For the first couple of years, so far as I could tell, few people knew of its existence aside from friends and family.  But in 2010, my readership -- as revealed by Google's statistics -- began steadily increasing.

In May and December of 2012, I had over 2,300 hits for each month.  That works out to about 75 hits per day.  I jauntily became used to such popularity, viewing it as the new normal and an important step toward world domination.  Although it did seem odd that so few of my visitors ever bothered leaving comments.  Other bloggers, writing on such topics as how to get coffee stains out of fabrics, seemed deluged with reader comments agreeing, disagreeing, ridiculing, or praising each post.

December 2012 was my apex, with 2,379 hits, 77 per day.  From that point, my fan base hit a gentle but steady decline.  By January 2015, I was down to 40 hits a day.  By January 2017, it was 21 hits per day.  And during 2018, I have seen day after day with 3, 4, or 5 hits per day.

Confusing, but not obscuring, these statistics was a day this past December when I had over 6,000 hits within a 24 hour period from someone (or some THING) in Russia.  This Russian entity systematically hit, multiple times, every essay I'd ever posted -- statistically about six times per essay.  Was someone printing out my entire blog for use in English classes?  A text on how not to write in English?  Who knows.

Am I down-hearted?  Hardly.  When I began writing this blog, I intended it -- aside from mutual entertainment between myself and another guy who had just started a blog of his own -- as an activity for my own amusement.  Over the years, I've discovered that its primary value is not, actually, practice in writing good English and organizing a good essay.  Although writing the blog has certainly proven useful for those purposes.

No.  What I didn't appreciate ahead of time was what a great value it would be for me to write out my reactions to magazine articles, movies, books, current events, and random thoughts that pop into my head.  The exercise forces me to organize my thoughts in some reasonably coherent fashion.  It also helps me to remember a book, say, or a movie, and my reaction to it, so that reading becomes more than a way to pass (waste) time.   To be pretentious, it hones my critical faculties.

I'd love to have more real readers, of course, as opposed to the robots whom I suspect constitute much of my reported audience.  But there are proven ways to develop a regular following, ways that I fully understand but am not interested in pursuing.  For example, writing regularly about a narrowly-focused subject, one that will draw the same readers back, week after week, hoping to learn more about that subject.  Instead of Confused Thoughts, I might title my blog dy/dx and All That: Fun and Games with Differential Equations.  I'm sure it would be an interesting blog, but that's not what I'm interested in doing.

So expect no changes.  I'll continue writing about anything that comes to mind.  And many things come to my mind.  If you don't like today's post, you may like next week's.  Or not.  As the man in the fable who carried his donkey across the bridge on his back discovered -- you can't please everybody.  And sometimes, you can't please anybody!