Several months ago, I noticed a weird spike in page views to my blog. For about six years, since I started this blog in the summer of 2017, I've been getting steady page views. Most of the time, I get maybe 15 to 40 views a day. My more popular BMX posts, back in 2017 and 2018, would sometimes get 300 to 800 views, in one or two days, on that one post. But usually I get somewhere between 20 and 100 views a day, with 15 to 30 being about average if I don't post that day. This blog has 373 backlinks, I just checked. Most of those are my own links, from social media and other blogs. a reader will find one of my other blogs, and at the bottom there's a link, "Hey, check out my main blog..." But not all of links are mine. There are sites linking to this blog from Slovakia, for example, that showed up on the report. There are BMXers, and people who read some of my financial oriented posts, from around the world.
Back in the late summer of 2019, this blog got banned from linking on Facebook. When I wrote a BMX post, I'd usually post it in 3 or 4 BMX groups on FB, so a bunch of Old School BMX freestylers could check out that post. I suddenly got tagged ad a spammer, for linking posts about Old School BMX freestyle, in Old School BMX freestyle Facebook groups. But in 2019, for whatever reason, I couldn't link to this blog, or any of my other blogs, from Facebook.
At the same time, my analytics here on Blogger (owned by Google) got weird as well. My page view count suddenly dropped by 80% to 90%. Before then, a good BMX post would usually get 300 to 400 page views, and after about August of 2019, a similar BMX post would get 30 to 40 views. It's like my page views were either being hidden, or the algorithm was just keeping my posts from being seen. Now, there's been all kinds of other weird shit happening in my life, going all the way back to right after the 9/11 attacks, in 2001. So to me this was "just another weird thing happening." Around that same time I got banned from linking this blog on FB, is when Peter Thiel started advising Facebook. A LOT of content creators, particularly on YouTube, started complaining about the algorithms around that same time.
But I just kept blogging, and after about four years, I suddenly could link this blog on Facebook again. But my number of page views was far less that whole time. I lost tens of thousands of page views because of not being able to link on FB.
I don't really care about absolute numbers of views, just that somebody is actually reading my posts on a consistent basis. If it's 15 people reading a post, or 1,000 reading it, doesn't really matter to me. I don't have ads on my blogs, so I don't need millions of views. I keep the counters on my blogs to show somebody actually reads these blogs. There are over 600 million blogs in the world, and most of them probably have fewer than 1,000 total views. Most bloggers don't promote their blogs, for a variety of reasons. I want somebody to read my stuff, so I promote my blog, post by post, so at least some people can find it.
I got up to about 140,000 page views on this blog, slow and steady, by mid 2023 or so. Then around 145,000 page views, I noticed a weird spike in views, thousands of views in a week, mostly from Singapore. When I look at the posts being checked out, it only shows the 20 to 40 daily views from regular people. I wasn't sure what was going on. That first spike was all from one kind of browser, on one kind of phone, from Singapore, according to my analytics. Then that spike passed, and things went back to normal. Then came another spike, but that one was from another region, a different computer and browser, and they appeared to be looking at 30 or 40 different posts. So some of these spikes look like this blog has gone viral in some region, where lots of people check it out. Like some influencer in that region said, "Hey, check this out." Other times, like the current spike of just under 1,500 views a day, for several days right now, are coming from Chrome on a Mac, and centered in Singapore, Hong Kong, and China, with 12 or 15 other countries also represented. Is is some hack? Is someone using A.I to scan my blog for keywords or themes? Is some group who doesn't like my financial posts trying to figure out who I am, and why a homeless guy writes about future market events and inflection points? I don't know.
In any case, this blog has blasted higher, with much of the last 115,000 or so page views coming largely from huge, unusual spikes, that I can't explain. It's just one more weird thing happening in our ever-changing world, and in the wild ride that is my life. At the same time, I'm getting 15 to 100 views a day, slow and steady, like always, checking out the BMX and other random things I blog about.
In any case, these weird spikes in page views have accounted for much of the last 115,000 views on this blog. I'm not sure what's going on.
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