Pageviews
I definitely feel like breaking out the champagne today. One million hits on my blog! That seems like quite a lot to me.
It all started in 2010, when they introduced a new feature on blogspot which made it possible to access easily a range of vital statistics about your site/s. As well as the basic count of how many hits each blogpost achieved, you could study your main sources of traffic, the ways in which visitors accessed your site, and other intriguing pieces of trivia.
Pageviews 2010-18
I started The Imaginary Museum back in 2006, so I'm not sure if those earlier posts (half of the 462 to date) are included in the tally. Whether they are or not, though, I find it rather amazing that this most self-indulgent of websites, dedicated to so many subjects which I suspect I'm quite unusual in finding fascinating - bibliography, ghosts, poetry, the 1001 Nights, poetry readings and book-launches - should have clocked up so many individual hits over the past eight years.
Top-earning posts
Mind you, I do understand what a blunt instrument such counters can be. There's nothing qualitative about this data. A long read of a post will show up just the same as a momentary glance at a headline or an image.
They're not all from me, either. There's a little link you can click on to make sure that your own pageviews don't get counted in the total, otherwise it would all seem a bit incestuous.
Pageviews by countries
And as for the countries the hits are coming from, why so many from Russia, for instance? Why more from Belgium than from Australia? It's hard to reach clear conclusions about such matters, beyond noting the bare facts.
More to the point, though, I recently conducted a census of all the various websites I operate (you can find a complete list of them here, if you're curious). The nearest contender to The Imaginary Museum was my book collection site, A Gentle Madness, which has reached 276,970 pageviews. Most of the others were considerably less than that - though I was pleased to see that my Leicester Kyle site had clocked up more than 50,000 hits.
In total, they came to more than 3,000,000 pageviews, so I'd have to say that this long experiment on online writing / publishing must be seen as a success. I don't see how I could ever reached anything like that number of people by conventional means.
No doubt Whale Oil and the Daily Blog get more than that number every hour, but then they are targetting a rather different audience.
Pageviews today
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Imaginary Museum stats (22/12/20)
[Postscript - 30th December 2020]:
As you'll see from the above, it's taken me roughly two years to collect another quarter of a million hits here on the Imaginary Museum. In the meantime, there's been a complete redesign of the editing platform, so the results present somewhat differently.
All-time Pageviews (30/12/20)
Here's how the pageviews break down over the past ten years. And below you can see a list of the top posts on the blog to date. I guess it means that there's some kind of an audience for my wares out there - it certainly makes me feel more like persevering with it, for the time being, at any rate.
Top-scoring posts
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