The Tipping Point

It's only taken 12 years.

They say that there's a point when the number of visitors to your blog explodes. I thought that had happened years ago, when I went from about 12 readers per day to 150. I was so excited and a bit humbled that so many people would want to read my material.

Honestly, writing posts for my blog is more of a mental-therapy exercise for myself than anything else, though I'm honoured to have loyal followers. Thank you so much. I hope I can be an entertaining distraction for part of your hectic day.

There have been times through the course of The Brown Knowser when I've had spikes in readership, but those spikes usually center on a particular post that has caught attention over one or two days.

It seems as though, possibly, that I've caught a lot more attention.

Since the end of May, my daily number of visitors has gone from an average of 150 people (or bots, perhaps?) to an average of more than 1,200 views. Some days, my blog has seen more than 80 views per hour and has even broken 2,000 views in a single day.

The last 30 days, as of midnight, June 18.

If things stay on course, I'm looking to break well over 30,000 views this month. Crazy!

All-time views, as of midnight, June 18.

I'm trying to think what it could be that I've done differently. After I moved from Twitter to Mastodon, last November, I went from announcing my blog posts from three times a day to two. At first, the number of daily views dropped a little but started recovering after a couple of months.

When I learned that Twitter hadn't actually closed my account, I started reusing the account only to announce daily blog posts, and I did so only twice daily (sometimes, only once). My viewership stayed at about 150 to 160 views per day.

But I've noticed that over the past few months, some of my followers on Mastodon were boosting (like retweeting) my blog announcements. The overall average didn't change until May 30, when the number of daily views jumped to more than 960. On May 31, the viewership jumped to more than 1,300.

As I've said, my average viewership has been about 1,200 or so for the month of June. Tell me, dear folks, what have I done to draw this much attention?

Have I reached some sort of tipping point?

The pressure's on to not disappoint but not knowing what has caused this sudden jump in visitors makes it a challenge to keep the momentum going. Perhaps, me just doing me is enough?

Thank you to all of you for supporting my blog. If you want to support me further, consider subscribing to my YouTube channel and helping it grow. And, as always, you can buy me a coffee...

As this is a Monday and I used to post music at the start of the week, I thought I'd end this post with a song that popped into my head when I started writing it. It's "The Tipping Point," from Tears for Fears, which was released in February, 2022.

Happy Monday!