I have a cousin who writes for a video game site --none of the ones in MMO space, in case you're wondering*-- and back in 2015 the pageviews frequently reached the 50,000-100,000 mark. Given the average pageview of an MMO blog is measured by a much smaller number (and PC, in particular, seems to have a relatively loyal audience of 30-40 people), I was curious about how the site he writes for got that big.
"I don't know," he said, "we just write about what people want and we promote ourselves a bit, and things just took off."
In 2015, that meant MOBAs and console games. But still, the sheer size of pageviews caught my attention.
And really, if I thought that was big, I hadn't seen anything yet.
I'd been reading up a bit lately on Influencers and "Influencer Culture"**, because I've been trying to understand the appeal that influencers draw upon. They aren't celebrities in the purest sense, but some of them have become de-facto celebrities in their own right. They have their own followers and detractors --I mean, look at Asmongold for one obvious example-- but a lot of the influencers', well, influence comes from being perceived as a source of trust.
"I don't know," he said, "we just write about what people want and we promote ourselves a bit, and things just took off."
In 2015, that meant MOBAs and console games. But still, the sheer size of pageviews caught my attention.
And really, if I thought that was big, I hadn't seen anything yet.
***
I'd been reading up a bit lately on Influencers and "Influencer Culture"**, because I've been trying to understand the appeal that influencers draw upon. They aren't celebrities in the purest sense, but some of them have become de-facto celebrities in their own right. They have their own followers and detractors --I mean, look at Asmongold for one obvious example-- but a lot of the influencers', well, influence comes from being perceived as a source of trust.
Truth is somewhat malleable, depending on the influencer, but trust is the engine of the influencing process. You don't even have to trust in what the influencer says, to put it another way, but you have to trust that you'll be entertained in some manner. Quite a few people may put eyeballs on controversial influencers, not because they believe in what bill of goods they're being sold, but because the influencer can pull on their emotions.
That's why, love him or hate him, people watch Asmongold's videos. If you didn't give a whoop about him, you'd not be watching.
***
But I think one thing that my cousin mentioned, about writing what people want, is highly important.
In an age of AI generated posts based on what will generate the most clicks, finding what people want isn't exactly rocket science. The blandness that permeates most AI created written content, however, will turn people off. I know I don't like anything that resembles a poorly written technical manual, no matter how tailored the content is toward my interests, and I work in IT.
What my cousin missed was that it's more than just promotion and writing relevant content, but writing relevant content that people enjoy reading. It's that human element***, the writer's voice, that will keep people interested and coming back for more.
Yes, there's a "lightning in a bottle" aspect to some website or person hitting it big, but that emotive element has to come from somewhere. And once people know they can expect you to provide that element, that's when you've got them.
***
Sounds easy, right? Heh. If you've ever tried to make creative content before, you know how hard it can be. Or how much self doubt can cripple you. I can actually speak to this with some experience here, given that PC is pretty long in the tooth as far as continuously active creative content goes. So if you think I can look at the success of my cousin (or others) and only feel jealousy, you're sadly mistaken. I have a lot of respect for what they accomplished, and I realize that what they've been able to do does come at a cost. My determination to do things my own way is a reflection on what I feel the personal and professional cost might be if I decided to start chasing clicks and generate content at a level I don't feel comfortable with and with a personal slant I disagree with. And those that actually can pull that off and generate eyeballs? My hat's off to them for what they've accomplished.
*Not my place to say which one, because he goes by a pseudonym.
**Sadly, MMOs were not on the radar. That would have been in 2005 rather than 2015. But the book that kicked off this interest is Influencer by Brittany Hennessy.
*Not my place to say which one, because he goes by a pseudonym.
**Sadly, MMOs were not on the radar. That would have been in 2005 rather than 2015. But the book that kicked off this interest is Influencer by Brittany Hennessy.
***For the time being, anyway.
EtA: Corrected the "**".
Well 36 to 41 loyal readers. I recently added you to my blogroll after noticing you commenting on many of the same blogs I follow :-)
ReplyDeleteWhen almost everything I posted got picked up by Massively OP, that helped my traffic a lot (that was a strange year). It also creeps up any time I am able to post steadily for a few months in a row. However I don't think anything I would consider writing would ever generate huge traffic, steady posting or no. Certainly not enough to bother with ads.
Thanks for the add! And you have a DaoC guide site... I've got a WoW Classic friend who no longer plays, but he has an Asheron's Call private server he maintains, so I get the appeal of the really old MMOs.
DeleteOh, definitely (about the ads). I've never bothered, not because I'm a purist --okay, maybe I am a bit of one-- but because the pageviews are so small that I'm never tempted to put on advertising.
The largest pageviews for the blog came back in the "old days" of WoW Insider, when they used to have that weekly feature of interesting blog posts around the WoW-verse. When we'd get a post featured there, the pageviews shot up into the upper-100s/low-1000s for that post. However, those days are long gone, and even WoW Insider killed off the feature long before joystiq folded. Even before Rades and Vidyala joined the WoW Insider staff, now that I think about it.
This is an endlessly fascinating topic for me, not because I care all that much about how many people read my blog but because no amount of study, experimentation, investigation or research has ever been able to tell me what any of the figures actually mean. For example, Blogger has steadfastly told me for years that I have almost no followers. I think the latest count is 19. Feedly, on the other hand, tells me I have 291.
ReplyDeletePage views are even more confusing. Blogger produces its own stats and Blogger belongs to Google. Bloger consistently tells me I have about ten times as many page views as Google Analytics records. For the last 30 days, Blogger tells me I had 100k page views. Yesterday, apparently, I had 2,860 views.
Analytics, however, counts "Active Users" not "page Views" and has me at 934 Active Users in the last 30 days, 41 yesterday.
When you also consider that of the 2,860 page views Blogger says I had yesterday, 2,610 of them came from Singapore, it looks like Blogger counts all page views equally, including bots, while Analytics only tracks bona fide viewers (Somehow...)
Do you know if your cousin's site's page views are filtered to exclude bots? Because if not, you can probably knock an order of magnitude off the numbers. Until I have a reasonable level of confidence that the stats I'm seeing represent actual people actually looking at the pages (Even if only for a glance to see if they want to carry on reading.) I'm not going to bother about stats at all. My benchmark is comments - real ones again, not bots, of which I get many hundreds every month.
Oh yes, I often wonder how they count pageviews in Blogger versus Google Analytics. I do know that each time I visit one of my pages I show up as a pageview, despite my attempts to have them ignore me. I suspect my VPN is getting in the way of Blogger's recognition of "oh hey, it's you", but apparently Google Analytics don't seem to have that issue.
DeleteThat does make me wonder why Blogger doesn't simply use Google Analytics as the default, since Blogger has been owned by Google since, well, forever, but I guess I shouldn't ask too many questions.
He didn't specify about pageviews versus Google Analytics, so I'm not even sure whether he knew the difference. (I did, because back when PC launched, Souldat asked me to install the predecessor to Google Analytics so we'd have monthly data, so I got to learn about how all that crap worked.) I'd have to think that since I know the site has ads and sponsors that they do make use of Analytics, but whether or not he's privy to that information is another question.
And yes, I prefer commenters to bots by a long shot, but I know from both Analytics and Blogger that PC's readership is incredibly small. The largest amount of traffic PC has seen over the past 10 years was my post about my hospital stay back in November 2021 --the comments alone prove that-- which goes to show that people can be rubberneckers of a sort when it comes to real life events.