Addicted to blogging... 15 1/2 years- Here's my top 30 blogs- 2,849 total posts- 840,110 total page views.

Selfie in front of a cool mural, the side wall of a Mexican restaurant in Studio City.  This is the closest thing I have to a decent photo of myself in recent years.  2021, I think.  

I started my first BMX freestyle zine in September of 1985, as a way to meet other freestylers, when I moved from Boise, Idaho to San Jose, California.  I was inspired by an article Andy Jenkins wrote about zines in FREESTYLIN'magazine.  While working nights at a Pizza Hut, I published my zine, starting with a $15, manual, 1940's era Royal typewriter, and a Kodak 110 Instamatic camera.  Eleven issues of that zine, San Jose Stylin', landed me a job at Wizard Publications, drawing me into the BMX industry.  At 20 years old, I worked at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines for five months, and got laid off because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy.  Well, that, and I was a really uptight, moody dork in those days.  

I then worked as editor/photographer at the AFA newsletter for most of 1987.  That led to video work, and a job at Unreel Productions, Vision Skateboards' video company, for about 2 1/2 years, into 1990.  I published a few issues of a zine called Periscope, while working at Unreel.  Altogether, I've published over 40 zines, several of them 40-52 pages, which is really big for a zine.  

In 2007, working as a taxi driver, I got the idea to start a blog about taxi driving.  It sucked.  I think only my mom and the police read it, which are the people you don't want reading your blogs.  I did maybe 30 posts, and got 45 views or something.  Then Fate pushed me out of Southern California in late 2008, after taxi driving died, and I'd been homeless and on the streets for almost a year. 

I wound up living with my parents, in a small apartment, in a tiny town in North Carolina.  I was unable to find any job at all, as the country plunged into the Great Recession.  I became seriously depressed almost immediately in NC.  I was 42, unemployed, fat, broke, had no car, and was living with my parents.  I did, for the first time in my life, have a decent computer, with internet access, in my room.  I began "surfing the web" each night, just exploring the internet.  Remember those days when we called it "surfing the web?"  

After looking up BMX and porn for a a few hours, every night, for a couple of weeks, I got bored, and decided to publish a BMX blog.  I started FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, after finding the FREESTYLIN' book online.  I decided to write a few of my stories from my short stint working there in 1986.  I was completely clueless, I didn't promote my blog in any way, put tags on it, or link to it from anywhere.  I wasn't on any social media, and didn't even really know what that was then.  I'd been living in a taxi or homeless on the streets for the previous 6 or 7 years.  The internet was basically brand new to me.  I thought blog posts just went out into this big black hole of cyber space, and just sat there waiting for someone to randomly find them.  I started writing little stories about my magazine days, every couple of nights.    

One post in particular, found an audience, after about a month.  People from BMX freestyle in the 1980's started emailing me.  Some were people I knew back then, some were people I knew of, but had never really met.  A few were complete strangers.  They all told me to keep writing.  So I did.  That was before the Old School BMX Reunion began, and long before podcasts with old BMX freestylers telling their stories.  

Since that first real blog, I've tried out somewhere between 50 and 100 different blog ideas.  A handful of my blogs found audiences, most of them in the Old School BMX freestyle world.  This is post #998 of Steve Emig: The White Bear blog, a blog I started in 2017, thinking almost no one would bother to read it.  I was wrong, people started checking it out.  And people kept checking it out.  I figured it was time to total up my blog stats, as this blog is about to hit a brand new milestone for me, 1,000 posts in a single blog.  To put that in perspective, Internet marketer Seth Godin has over 8,000 posts on his Seth blog, which he started in 2000 or so.  I have been able to find who the next most prolific bloggers are.  But out of an estimated 600 million blogs on the internet, I'm near the very top by sheer number of total blog posts.  No one keeps stats after Seth's blog, but very few blogs get to 1,000 or more posts.  I've now written and published over 2,849  posts.

So here are the stats on my various blogs, the ones with more than 1,000 page views each, anyhow.  

FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales- 2008-2009:  about 110 posts, over 25,000 page views.  Took it down in 2012.

Freestyle BMX Tales- 2009-2012:  About 510 posts, and over 125,000 page views.  Took it down in 2012. 

Make Money Panhandling- 2009-2011:  This was a joke blog that I started just to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques.  It got serious, and I wrote over 100 posts, and got over 60,000 page views.  I took it down in 2012. 

Steve Emig: The White Bear- 2017-2024- 998 posts- 331,578 page views.  I seriously thought almost no one would read this blog when I began it, right after I moved into a tent in the woods, while living in North Carolina, in June of 2017.  It's become my longest and most read blog ever.  You never know when you start a creative project where it will ultimately lead.

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack- 55 posts- over 1,500 page views.  I'm doing a lot of longer form writing on Substack lately, a platform designed specifically for writers.  

Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- Book 1- 2019-2020- This is my 20 chapter "book/blog thing," describing the economic and social chaos I saw coming in The Tumultuous 2020's.  This is the most intense thing I've written, trying to explain in late 2019 and early 2020 why I thought the 2020's would turn into one of the craziest decades ever.  20 posts- 6,047 page views.  

Freestyle BMX Tales (Version 2- on Wordpress, not Blogger):  I wrote a couple of dozen posts, I think.  I forget the stats.  Went back to Blogger, which works better for me. 

 Freestyle BMX Tales (Version 3)- 2015-2022- 102 posts- 72,769 page views.

Become Your Own Hero- 2015-2016:  50 posts- 5,680 page views.

Bum to Bankroll- 2016- 51 posts- 5,858 page views.

Cash Poor, Story Rich- 2016- 7 posts- 2,504 page views.

Crazy California 43- 2021- 75 posts- 16,632 page views.

Check out Downtown Kernersville- 2016- 6 posts- 2,067 page views.

Create Your Own Dang Job- 2016-2017- 17 posts- 2,500 page views.

Freaks, Geeks, Dorks, and Weirdos- 2016- 11 posts- 4,348 page views.

Full Circle 43 blog- 28 posts- 2,922 page views.  

Get Off Your Ass and Make a Scene- 2017- 8 posts- 1,686 page views.

Get Weird Make Money- 2017- 38 posts- 6,231- page views.

How to Make Your Lame City Better- Part 1- 2016-2023- 26 posts- 4,192 page views.

How to Make Your Lame City Better- Part 2- 2016- 57 posts- 2,565 page views.

I Hate Homeless People (yes, the title is sarcastic)- 2020- 14 posts- 1,690 page views.

New Ideas For Old Buildings- 2017- 25 posts- 2,651 page views.

Small Business Blaster- 2020- 17 posts- 4,575 page views.

Small Business Futurist- 2023- 43 posts- 10,650 page views.

Steve Emig Art- 2015-2016- 86 posts- 20,597

Steve Emig Adventuring- 2020-2021- 67 posts- 9,012  

Steve Emig's Street Life- 2022- 126 posts- 23, 164

Block Bikes Blog- 2019- 96 posts- 44,259 page views.

The Phoenix Great Depression- 2020- 48 posts- 2020- 8,752 page views.

The Spot Finder- 2021- 39 blog posts- 8,513 page views.

Uncle Steve's Music Picks- 2016- 2023- 34 posts- 2,243 page views.

WPOS Kreative Ideas- 2021- 40 posts- 26,424 page views.  

These are just the blog ideas that I've tried, that pulled in at least 1,000 page views per blog.  There are at least 30 other blogs I started from 2009-2012, that I deleted in late 2012 (big mistake).  There are at least 10 or 15 more blogs I've tried since 2012.  But these are the ones that actually got some readership while sitting out there on the interwebs.  I have not used A.I. to write posts, that seems stupid to me.  The whole point is to get my own, personal idea out there.  For good or ill, I wrote every single post myself.  I don't see the point in using A.I. to write a post, because it'll just be boring garbage, and the algorithms wouldn't like it anyway.  

Obviously, turning my prodigious output of writing into actual income is the issue I've struggled with.  But I'll keep plugging away.  I wake up in the morning, on the sidewalk as a homeless guy, and slowly get myself going.  Once I'm up, I say, out loud, "Let's go create some shit!"  Then I try to do some writing or drawing, every single day.  You can get a lot of create work down if you can't find a "real" job for 15 years.  

This blog is rolling up on the 1,000 post milestone, this is post #998

I've been doing a lot of writing on a platform called Substack lately, which is designed for writers.  Check it out.  

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

My thoughts on financial markets

White Bear Investment Ideas

 

The last 115,000 page views

 Here's a peak at my Blogger analytics.  This latest spike, nearly 9,000 views, centered in Singapore, Hong Kong, China, along with Denmark and about 12 other countries, all in the last week.  I don't know what's causing these spikes in page views.  The darker areas on the world map are the countries where recent views have come from.

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.   

My page view counter is still disabled on my main blogs...

 For reasons I don't know, my page view counter is not visible on my main blogs.  Here are the current page view counts for the four main blogs I have now:

Steve Emig: The White Bear- 133,699

Freestyle BMX Tales- 44,804

Crazy California 43- 2,901

Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now - 2,496

"Dystopia" is about this decade, the "Tumultuous 2020's" we are all now experiencing.  It's a book as a blog, written from October 2019 to April 2020.  

If you're really bored, here's my post about the 25 main blogs I've tried out, which have racked up over 438,000 page views in total.  Just for clarification, when someone looks at one page on a blog or website, that's a page view.  If they look at ten pages, that's 10 page views.  

Addicted to blogging...

Why are my page view counts not in view of the public?  Good freakin' question.  Censorship and "algorithm warfare" (directing viewers away form certain blogs/websites/YouTube channels) are rampant online today.  It's a crazy world, and art, science, and truth get attacked constantly.  

Blogger's note- 3/16/2022- Page view counter visible again.  Cool.  

There are now 133,257 page views on this blog...

 Again... the page view counters on all my blogs don't seem to be appearing.  Mostly because I actually HAVE page views on all my blogs, I guess.  Censorship and web BS keeps escalating.  This blog was started in late June of 2017, BTW.  Around 20,000 page views a year.  

Blogger's note- 3/5/2022- The page view counters on this blog, and my other blogs that I've checked, are still not appearing.  More internet shennanigans going on, I don't know why.  My Freestyle BMKX Tales blog has over 44,000 page views, for example.  But someone, somewhere, doesn't want you to know that.  Freakin' douchebags and they're censorship.  Jeeeez...