2,000,000+ Hits!

2,000,110 Pageviews (5/8/2024)

I wrote a post a little over five years ago about breaking the million hit barrier on this blog. I'm glad to see that the traffic must have more than doubled over this period, as it took me more than a dozen years to reach that original figure.

1,000,000 Pageviews (14/6/06-6/12/18)

As I said in that earlier post:

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 ...

Frequency of hits

Admittedly some of the more recent increase in traffic took place during the Covid lockdowns, when people were more prone to itinerant scrolling. However, if anything, the number of hits on my posts seems to have grown over the past few months, as you can see from the graph above.

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.

Location of hits

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.

Countries of origin

And as for the countries the hits are coming from, why so many from France, for instance? Why more from Russia (and Singapore) than from New Zealand? 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 this one, The Imaginary Museum, was my book collection site, A Gentle Madness, which has reached 439,131 pageviews. Most of the others were considerably less than that - though I was pleased to see that our Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive site has clocked up 319,446 hits.

In total, they came to approximately four and a half million 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.

I know that blogs are now considered passé - but then the same fate seems to overtake each new social media platform in turn: even the giants of the internet, Instagram, X [the site formerly known as Twitter], Tik-tok et al. Enforced obsolescence pursues us all.

For my own part, though, I still like blogs. They're a great way to comment on the world around you - albeit usually to a very specialised sub-tribe of users. In my case this includes bookhounds and pop culture vultures generally.

Favourite Posts (5/8/24)

Pageviews (6/12/18)

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Breaking the Million-Hit Barrier

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

Crazy Like a Fox

[Nicholas A. Basbanes: A Gentle Madness (1995)]

-----Original Message-----

From: David Howard
Sent: Wednesday, 16 December 2009 8:32 p.m.
To: Jack Ross
Subject: booked


Dear Jack,

I have just visited your library catalogue. Of course, I love you - and part of what I love in you is your precision. But you are certifiable.

Please offer my sympathies to Bronwyn.

David

It's hard to deny the logic of David's remarks. The whole thing seems pretty crazy to me, too, some - even most - of the time. Hence ( I suppose) my choice of title for this bibliography blog: A Gentle Madness.

Interestingly, in the 1999 paperback reissue of his fascinating account of "Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books," Nicholas Basbanes mentions that at least one of his featured collectors, a retired psychoanalyst, had expressed a certain disquiet over his choice of title: "We take madness very seriously in my line of work." [xxv].

Is it mad to collect books; and then, once you have them neatly ranged in bookcases, to catalogue them by location and category? Surely not. Professional librarians would be in a lot of trouble if one were to resort to such facile diagnoses. Like most manias, it's clearly a matter of proportion.

So:

• When you find yourself going in to debt to buy new books, even though you don't have enough space to display the existing ones, I think you could be said to have edged over from Bibliophilia to Bibliomania. It is, I have to say, a terrifyingly easy step to take.


• When you no longer read the books you buy, for fear of damaging them, or because their contents no longer interest you as much as their bindings, fonts, paperstock and other physical traits, you've ceased to be a book-lover and have become a mere collector.


• When you're forced to buy multiple copies of the same book, or even of the different impressions of a particular edition of a book, you've become a bibliographer, not a reader.

I'd like to believe that I'm still a bibliophile rather than a bibliomaniac, a reader rather than a collector, and that I acquire them for use rather than for show. You may think otherwise when you check out the online catalogue, though.

I hasten to say that it's very much a work in progress. In the geographical section, mapping the locations of the various books, 7 out of 26 bookcases, containing an estimated 6,000-odd books, remain to be catalogued - which might be seen as overshadowing the 8,562 already listed.

The 30-odd classificatory categories, too, are by no means complete. I haven't yet had time to reconcile them all with one another, and the larger pages are already starting to groan at the seams.

Why am I even bothering? Well, first of all, it's nice to take out every book and take a good look at it (discovering little treasures which one had forgotten ever getting is a lot of fun, too). Secondly, it's useful and (ultimately, I hope) timesaving to know where everything is. Thirdly, it saves one the trouble of rewriting out the bibliographical details of a book more than once, when it's being repeated in a number of different contexts.

That last one sounds a little unconvincing, I suppose, but when your book collection shadows your professional interests as closely as mine does, it really does make sense to have a complete catalogue.

Strangely enough, even though my reasons for putting this slowly-evolving print catalogue up online were purely practical - it enables me to access it wherever I happen to be working - I've found that it seems to be attracting a certain amount of interest. The blog has no fewer than five followers already, though I can't think what satisfaction they obtain from watching it slowly grow.

Maybe they just like to look at the pictures. I have to say that finding appropriate images to attach to the various entries is the only really fun part of the whole monstrous drudgery. When it's all finished, though, how I shall gloat and preen myself! Perhaps I really will run mad ...

[Charles Wysocki: Max in the Stacks]