{"id":2915,"date":"2007-12-31T16:41:34","date_gmt":"2007-12-31T11:11:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200712\/state-of-the-blog-report\/"},"modified":"2007-12-31T16:42:30","modified_gmt":"2007-12-31T11:12:30","slug":"state-of-the-blog-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200712\/state-of-the-blog-report\/","title":{"rendered":"State of the Blog Report"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As this will be the last post of 2007, I will take the opportunity to indulge in some shameless navel gazing about how <em>The Examined Life<\/em>\u00a0 has done since its relaunch\u00a0on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200708\/the-examined-life-v-40\/\">August 14<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We have been averaging about 20 posts a month, which is about right if one is talking of long posts, but not enough short posts.<\/li>\n<li>I am happy with the quality of the posts. If you guys don&#8217;t like it, why are you sticking around?<\/li>\n<li>I haven&#8217;t covered the variety of subjects I intended to write on.<\/li>\n<li>I haven&#8217;t launched the sub-blogs I wanted to.<\/li>\n<li>I have been too lackadaisical about starting new series and not following up on them.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I seem to have collected a good number of readers.\u00a0My posts\u00a0are commented upon, and people seem to argue over them,\u00a0which\u00a0I suppose is as much as one can hope for.\u00a0<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>My Google Analytics account tells me that I get over 200 visitors on a typical weekday.<\/li>\n<li>But over half of them come from search engines searching for terms that I don&#8217;t wish to repeat here for fear of reinforcing those search results.<\/li>\n<li>Around 20% of my visitors come to my site directly and around 7% visit from either Google Reader or Bloglines.<\/li>\n<li>Around 18% come from various referring sites.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>I have around 180 subscribers on Google Reader. I don&#8217;t use feedburner, which means that I have no way of knowing how many subscribe to my feed from Bloglines or other feedreaders.\u00a0 But my Google Reader-Bloglines split on <em>visits<\/em> is 60:40. If I can extrapolate, I should be having 120 Bloglines readers and 300 people who subscribe to my feeds, assuming that I can ignore other feedreaders &#8211; and I am sure that assumption is only partly right.<\/li>\n<li>I wish there was some way of knowing how many subscribers actually read my posts.\u00a0 I myself have a huge subscription list on my Google Reader, but read very few of them and my only interaction with most of my subscriptions is to mark them as read periodically.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In general,\u00a0it seems to me that while there is a lot of <em>data<\/em> on page views and visitors, all of which is useful to anyone interested in page views, visitors and google adsense revenues,\u00a0 it is difficult to extract from these <em>information <\/em>of the kind I want &#8211; how many engaged readers I have, and how they read my blog, how regularly, etc.\u00a0 But I think\u00a0that it is fair to draw some inferences:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Most people read\u00a0my blog\u00a0from feedreaders.<\/li>\n<li>A visitor from a search engine is generally not a prospect to be converted into a regular reader. Most people who come to this site from search engines end up wasting their time and my bandwidth.<\/li>\n<li>A visitor from a referring site is a better prospect. I have no way of knowing how many get converted to regular readers.<\/li>\n<li>Old posts rarely get read. The decay rate is very high. Most posts get all their readers within two days of being posted.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All these give me some interesting ideas about what to do about my blog&#8217;s design, layout and style. All of these will be unveiled over the next few days.\u00a0 In the mean time, thanks for writing and please come again!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As this will be the last post of 2007, I will take the opportunity to indulge in some shameless navel gazing about how The Examined Life\u00a0 has done since its relaunch\u00a0on August 14.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2915"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}