I’m on a bit of a posting tear today. I thought to myself, “Self, why don’t you share some of the pertinent statistics about this blog, so that people can now how great or pathetic it is?” I thought, “Self, that’s a great idea”. Even though it probably isn’t. So this post is going to be mostly numbers. But hopefully you like it. I won’t share anything that is not of general interest.

Let’s start with some of the basic stuff.

There are 322 posts, and 66 drafts. The blog was created on Mar. 4, 2018. This means the site has been up for 1,280 days. This is an average of one post about every four days. Not too shabby.

There are 158 followers (thank you!).

This year, there have been so far 112 posts, 269 total likes (which is an average of two likes per post, again thank you!). This year I have written about 71,000 words, which comes to around 635 words for post. There have been 40 comments (thank you again!). It doesn’t really feel like that many, but they may also be including spam, I’m not quite sure how that works.

In total, there have been 598 likes, about 172,000 words, and 136 comments. A large fraction of those likes have been about four or five people. You know who you are. Thank you.

All time, there have been 6,534 views and 4,620 visitors. The best day for views was two days ago, at 64.

These are all interesting statistics. A part of me feels like these are terrible stats for being in existence for three years and change, but maybe it’s not really about stats anyway, right? I’m doing what I need to do, and some people are reading, and numbers aren’t too important. I’m sure some blogs do worse. So I’m not at all complaining.

So, I’m going to go into another stat that’s a little less pleasant. I want to preface this by saying that I’m simply being transparent, and then I’ll go into more detail after.

Amount of money I have spent on this blog since I created it: $192, give or take. Possibly more. Amount I have made: zero.

This is not a plea for money. As of right now, I don’t have any plans to enable patreon, ads, or anything else like that. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that this blog is always going to be a labor of love, and I will probably never break even on it. In fact, I can’t think of any viable way to monetize it, so it’s going to be what it’s going to be. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is a loss. It would be nice to at least break even, but I have no idea how, not without seeming like a money grab and fundamentally changing the nature of this blog.

I don’t know how to monetize blogs. The first step is making a monetizable blog. I’m not even sure I know how to do that. My new projects are an attempt at that, and I suspect are going to fail miserably – but less so than this one, I suppose.

So, dear readers, I guess I’m telling you that I’m losing money on this, and doing it just because I want to. I appreciate everyone who has read, liked, commented, whatever metrics are getting measured, I appreciate your adding to them. Ultimately, they do not translate to any gain for me except for a temporary ego-boost – which is not an insignificant thing. So thank you for that, and thank you for reading my ramblings over the past three years and change.

Maybe I won’t post more today, but I have a vacation coming up next week, so I will probably be inundating y’all with ramblings. Hopefully some will be good.