I'm kind of grateful that my little corner of the internet isn't that popular.
As I've said in the past, there's less than 100 people who regularly follow the channel (likely closer to 30 than 100), so I very rarely see much traffic beyond web crawlers out there. When you see traffic to the blog on blogger.com that says "5K" but when you go on Google Analytics and see "15", you know that you have a LOT of bot traffic.*
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| Truth, but I have it anyway. From StatsGlitch. |
I realize I'm a bit of an outlier in that I'm perfectly happy not having much of an online presence. There's tons of people creating online content for various reasons, and here I am not really worried that I'm monetizing my blog that much.**
Consequently, my normally shy self is served by not being recognizable out in public. Ever since I grew a beard in college, I've been able to be anonymous out in public despite being a redhead; people who knew me in grade or high school have a hard time recognizing me now. It's not perfect, since some people do recognize me every couple of years in this metro area of ~2.3 million people, but I can live with that. If I ever became a published author, my nightmare would be that I'd have to go out on a book tour, so maybe it's for the best that I'm not that good enough of a writer to have to worry about that sort of thing.
But sometimes I do wonder how I'd handle that "being recognized" scenario.
Luckily for me, some YouTubers who are far more well known than I'll ever be have had to deal with that, and they made posts about their adventures.
This first one, from Rebecca Parham, stumbled into my feed a couple of weeks ago. Until that moment, I was blissfully unaware of who she was. While I'm happy that she's doing well, I'm also perfectly aware she exists in a completely different orbit than I inhabit.
I think that it's a good thing that both of them are in the sort of fandom where they don't have to deal with creepers all that much, but I'm also quite aware that their part of the internet only has occasional interactions with mine at best. There was a bit of culture shock involved when I said to myself "Just who are these people?" and went down the rabbit hole for a while, the same sort of culture shock when I noted that the mini-Reds were watching videos some somebody named Pewdiepie and I felt obligated to find out what that was all about.***
Yeah, I think I'm happy being in my own lane. I'm not sure how I'd handle it if the spotlight of fame were to shine on me, even within such a limited topic as MMO video games.
*There's also the fact that apparently a lot of traffic suddenly began flowing from Brazil of all places, and you know that it's a bot of some sort.
**Because I use an ad blocker on all of my browsers, I don't even know if my blog has any ads visible to people. Since I've not allowed custom ads on the site...
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| Here's the proof. |
there ought to not be any ads. If there are any ads, however, I get so little "real" traffic that I'd never see a dime anyway.
***It was a short-lived interest, which was fine with me.
Heh, I saw that Jaiden Animations video yesterday! I've been following her for a little while.
ReplyDeleteI'm always a bit ambivalent about online fame. Sometimes I do wish my blogs had slightly more readers, if only because I miss the times when the comment section was a lot more lively.
But then I think of the horrors I've seen fame of the wrong kind inflict on people (Lindsay Ellis has been the most striking example to me personally) and say "no, thanks". Even on a minor level, before you get to the toxic side of fandom, it just feels like something that's too hard to control.
I sadly don't remember where exactly I heard it, but I do think it was a YouTube video on the subject of success and the quote was "you can't choose what you become famous for", with the example given of a channel that made videos about multiple subjects, but then one particular video went viral, so they basically had to become "that [subject x] channel" to keep riding the wave of success, even if perhaps that wasn't what the person originally wanted.
I think of that sometimes when people in SWTOR fandom describe me as "the one who did the pacifist levelling series", because yes, that's a thing I did and enjoyed, but it was just one random project and it always surprises me to how many people that seems to be the thing I'm known for (if at all).
The funny thing is that I think more about your blooper videos than your pacifist leveling experience. The fact that you could level as a pacifist is kind of a big deal. I tried doing it in Vanila Classic once, and you simply can't. There's really no other way to level unless you kill things, and it wasn't until... Cataclysm, maybe? that you could finally obtain XP via mining and herb gathering, so it became viable. (Hence that Pandaren leveling on the Panda starting zone without choosing a faction.) If I could level by fishing in Retail, I'd consider trying it out, but I discovered that you don't get XP for fishing. Alas.
DeleteOkay, all that aside, I do agree that despite everybody's best efforts at marketing, the creator(s) don't get to choose what goes viral. If that were the case, the 80s and 90s boy bands would still be riding at the top of the music charts. I'm frequently surprised by what generates the most pageviews on this blog, bots notwithstanding, and if you'd have told me that my Coffee Memes post was going to have the single highest number of pageviews in PC history (9.6k as of today), I'd have thought you were crazy.
It is what it is, and at least I have a creative outlet for my writing impulse. The blog gets archived by the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, so I hope PC will live on in perpetuity when I'm gone. (No, I'm not planning on going anywhere, it's just that I've become more accustomed to thinking about such things since 2021. Dealing with trying my father's stuff after his death has also shone a spotlight on what I also have around the house, and what the hell will become of it all.)