I’ve noticed a shift in this blog‘s audience during the almost nine years I’ve been writing it. Early on, bloggers and non-bloggers alike read my posts. But in recent years, if you read this blog regularly you probably have a blog, too, and it’s probably on WordPress.com. So say my stats.
Those stats also say that most visits to this blog come from Google searches. Someone finds Grandpa’s old camera in a drawer, or wants to get film developed, or remembers the CBS Late Movie, and searches to learn more. It’s easy to be an authority on the Internet: write about something arcane or obscure, and searches will drive visitors to your door! But those search-driven visitors never become regular readers. They came here for information about that subject and, once satisfied, go away forever.
Yet those searches have made 2015 far and away the best year this blog has ever had, at least as measured by page views. A handful of my posts about photography have become relatively popular, and drive 200 to 300 page views a day.
On the one hand, I’m glad to have published a few things that people find useful. On the other, what makes me keep blogging is engaged readership. I love it when you comment. I like it when you click Like.
But because I write of the obscure and arcane — old cameras, old roads, the dusty corners of my faith — well, my fantasies of Internet fame with thousands of adoring readers will just have to remain fantasies. I’m grateful I have regular readers at all.
I figure there are on the order of magnitude of 100 of you, people who look at each of my posts on or near the day I publish them. And I thank the Internet that we’ve found each other. Our blogs link us through our common, but unusual, interests. For example, I’ve collected cameras for 40 years. It was a lonely hobby until I started this blog and met you.
And that, I think, is where blogging shines: in the niches. It didn’t used to be that way. Blogs used to be like online diaries that anyone could read. But Facebook fills that need now. And in blogging‘s early days, it was possible to gain a large audience and make money directly by blogging. Some of those early big bloggers are still at it. But today, too many voices clamor for attention. Anyone who wants to attract a large audience on the Internet pretty much needs to write for a site that already gets lots of traffic.
And now I see that possibly even niche blogging could shift toward sites where traffic is already high. Facebook’s new Notes feature looks suspiciously like blogging. I could move there easily enough. I already have my account set up so anyone can follow me, and most of my posts there are public. And Facebook’s easy sharing might bring me more readers. All I’d have to do is start writing there.
Or I could move to Medium, an upstart writing platform that’s doing a stellar job of building an audience. It’s not on Facebook’s scale yet, but my read is that the audience there is engaged, where sometimes Facebook’s sharing can be a little mindless. I occasionally repost something from my software blog on Medium, but have yet to figure out how to get many readers.
WordPress does a pretty good job of shifting with the times. After all, WordPress powers one out of every four Web sites on the Internet! But notice I said Web sites and not blogs. This is a broadening of their original mission, a tacit admission that the personal blog‘s heyday is long past over.
So who knows where I will be blogging in a year, or two, or five. Regardless of platform, I will persist. I crave connection with like-minded people, and by keeping at this for almost nine years and by commenting on your blogs, you keep coming back here. I’m so grateful for you.
