This, That, and the Other

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on any day this past year and link to that post in a comment.

How about it? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Flashback Friday post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

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This was originally posted on May 10, 2012 on my old blog.

Phenomenon

A phenomenon, according to dictionary.com, is “something that is impressive or extraordinary.” Well, something really “impressive or extraordinary” happened to my blog.

I’ve mentioned several times in past posts that my blog doesn’t have much of a following. In fact, according to the statistics provided by TypePad, my blog hosting service, this modest little blog of mine goes mostly unnoticed.

Since I started this blog in July 2009, it has averaged barely nine page views per day, and I personally account for at least half that number because I am, unabashedly, my blog’s biggest fan.

Just last month, though, my blog averaged 21.6 page views per day, peaking at 66 on April 22nd. But this bump in traffic has a perfectly rational explanation. My recently retired and moderately conservative (registered Republican) brother-in-law just “discovered” my blog and has been commenting on some of my more politically provocative posts. Thanks for singlehandedly driving up my page views, bro.

What’s a page view?

The concept of page views is very important to bloggers. As the standard unit used to measure website traffic, it’s an indicator of a blog’s popularity. Each time a webpage is viewed, it counts as one page view. The more traffic a blog generates, the more page views it gets. The more page views it gets, the more commercially “successful” it has the potential to be.

That’s because blog sites that generate a lot of daily page views — and by “a lot” I mean hundreds, if not thousands, a day — may attract corporate sponsors that are willing to pay high traffic bloggers to put links to their corporate sites on their blogs. Then, for each person who goes to the blog and clicks through to the sponsor’s website, the blogger is compensated. Cha-ching!

I’ve been eagerly waiting to hear from a potential corporate sponsor so that I can retire without having to resort to applying for a job as a Walmart greeter. But, honestly, with an average of fewer than 10 page views per day, half of which are me viewing my own literary handiwork, that’s not likely to happen. Welcome to Walmart.

Up Up and Away!

Okay, now you know what page views are and why they are important, so it’s time to get back to the phenomenon that is the subject of this post. Over the past four days, the number of page views on my blog has inexplicably skyrocketed. On May 4th, my blog received 12 page views, which is just slightly above average.

But on Saturday, May 5th my blog got 273 page views! That’s around 30 times the number of page views my blog usually gets. On Sunday there were 358 page views. Holy shit! On Monday there were 255 page views. And, on Tuesday, May 8th, there were 97 more page views.

Of course, since the “phenomenon,” my page views are back down to earth, with 23 yesterday and 15 so far today.

The mystery in this unexplainable spike in page views is that almost all came from a September 2010 post about a bogus print ad for a fake Breyer’s ice cream flavor. What’s disconcerting to me is that I have no clue why, more than a year and a half after it was originally posted, that particular post is suddenly drawing a crowd.

But the good news is that, with all these page views, all I have to do now is sit by my phone and wait for some deep-pocketed corporation to call me up and offer to sponsor my blog and pay me lots of money.

Waiting…

Waiting…

Waiting…

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Well, folks, it’s been a dozen years since I wrote this post and I’m still waiting to be discovered and to start rolling in the dough. Also, in case anyone is interested, here is the post that generated all those anomalous page views back in 2021. I posted it as a Flashback Friday post here on this blog on September 10, 2021.