Lately, I have been looking at this website's traffic. If you were to graph traffic in number of actual people visiting the site and reading the content here, your graph would look a lot like a bell graph, with the highest number of people visiting in the summer months (June through August). This seems reasonable, as new content was being written daily. Looking at the dates and times of my entries in July, for example, it is clear that most of the time I was not writing here, I was asleep.
I fully realize that maintaining anyway near a similar output during the school year would be impossible, unless I was willing to spend all my time writing here instead of writing papers and going to class. Still, I find the idea that less people are reading my thoughts now than were reading in August to be depressing. I have concluded that this is a result of our celebrity-obsessed society.
When people learn I have a website, they often ask one of two questions:
- How many people visit the site each day?
- How much money do you make from Adsense?
Why do they ask these questions? Because there are two things that "everyone" wants, fame and wealth. My quantitative answers to the aforementioned questions would help the questioners place me in their mental hierarchy. If my answers were in the hundreds or thousands[1], I would become "that guy with the Famous Website."
In a nutshell, fame and wealth are the American Dream. We either hope to become wealthy, and thus become famous; or to become celebrities in order to become wealthy. I say "we" because I would like fame and wealth. If I was famous, people would visit this site because they had heard of me. If I was rich, people would visit in hopes of learning the secrets to becoming rich.[2]
Shortly after realizing all of this, I came to a revelation. If I wanted more traffic, I could either become ridiculously famous/wealthy very quickly, or I could compromise this website's integrity by posting seven times a day on flippant issues and ideas[3] that would attract more visitors. Things like celebrities and the same political issues that everyone else is talking about. So I decided to stop thinking about it, and deleted awstats.
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[1] Alas, they are nowhere near these levels.
[2] Nobody reads Blog Maverick because they are interested in IceRocket; they read it because Mark Cuban made billions in the Internet boom and bought the Dallas Mavericks. Heck, I bet most of you do not even know what IceRocket is.
[3] Of course, you could argue that this is all meta-blogging, which is the very definition of flippancy.
[...] Sometime last December (around the time I was writing about website traffic), I deleted AWStats, the log analysis program which told me which pages on this website were the most popular, who was linking to the site, etc. In order to solve my website statistics fix, I signed up for Google Analytics, the website statistics program derived from Google that was previously Urchin. Since it was a couple of months after Google Analytics was introduced, I was put on a waiting list. Sometime in late March, I ran across an essay suggesting that Google Analytics had serious privacy issues. The most pertinent issues in my mind were the possibilities that Google could use the data collected in Analytics for nefarious purposes and the fact that Google Analytics used the default Google.com privacy policy and terms of service, as opposed to one customized to the needs of Analytics users. This concerned me enough that I emailed the Google Analytics support staff. I received this response: Google takes data privacy very seriously and we recognize that it is important to our users and customers. Only Google Analytics account owners and those to whom they give permission may access their reporting data. Google support and client services specialists may access reporting data for the purposes of customer support. [...]