Wednesday, November 01, 2023
back to the usual - Oct. blog report
For whatever reason, blog visits were down across the board. As I backed off and looked at the whole list, it occurred to me that October visits were more like what I was getting for July and August, before this huge bloated run started sometime in the middle of August or September. It was September that was way huge, with some sites getting half of their historical totals in one month, or eight times the usual, that kind of thing. Where I got huge numbers in September (and part of Aug.), I don't know, but it's working its way down the system like a mouse which has been eaten by a snake, and averages (which drop off Aug. for July, and add Nov. for Oct.) are mixed. In other words one can consider the three month averages like a snake in that whether it goes down or up depends more on what one has added Nov. 1 compared to the Aug. 1 total that's been dropped off. The fact that there is a huge Sept. 1 and Oct. 1 total in the middle, will only matter next month.
So, why is October "normal" while September was "huge"? Your guess is as good as mine. One working theory of mine is that blog traffic is partially driven by shopping, which would make November itself slightly larger, and December too. We'll test that theory out this year (I state here my intention, not my rock-hard plan). By this theory maybe the cooler temps in Sept. (esp. in the north) drove people indoors to cruise the web. But that doesn't really explain the thousands, literally thousands in some cases, of new traffic to certain blogs. A better theory is a thorough bot which put a whole slew of them on the carousel, in which case they get a few thousand or in the case of extra people on the carousel for whatever reason, a few thousand more. My guess is that carousel traffic is somewhat random. Also, that if people found the "be there or be square" function on one of my blogs (thus hitting all the other big ones in a space of ten minutes), that would be fairly randoom too. Same with the "lighthouse tour" which takes them around my blogs. They can hit fifteen or twenty of them, but not really care about any of them.
A detailed study of where traffic comes from might be in order. But better, a study of what one can do to drive traffic to Amazon to buy books.
So, why is October "normal" while September was "huge"? Your guess is as good as mine. One working theory of mine is that blog traffic is partially driven by shopping, which would make November itself slightly larger, and December too. We'll test that theory out this year (I state here my intention, not my rock-hard plan). By this theory maybe the cooler temps in Sept. (esp. in the north) drove people indoors to cruise the web. But that doesn't really explain the thousands, literally thousands in some cases, of new traffic to certain blogs. A better theory is a thorough bot which put a whole slew of them on the carousel, in which case they get a few thousand or in the case of extra people on the carousel for whatever reason, a few thousand more. My guess is that carousel traffic is somewhat random. Also, that if people found the "be there or be square" function on one of my blogs (thus hitting all the other big ones in a space of ten minutes), that would be fairly randoom too. Same with the "lighthouse tour" which takes them around my blogs. They can hit fifteen or twenty of them, but not really care about any of them.
A detailed study of where traffic comes from might be in order. But better, a study of what one can do to drive traffic to Amazon to buy books.
