How The Other Half Lives

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.*

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.

Because I watched a few of Rebecca's videos, the algorithm started suggesting to me JaidenAnimations' videos, and as a consequence this one appeared as it dropped Saturday afternoon. If Rebecca's in an entirely different orbit than me, Jaiden is in another solar system. 

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...

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.