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| Abacus image from Pixabay |
Yesterday (Sunday, July 5) I had over a thousand views on this blog. Since April A2Z, I generally get about 200 per day, sometimes 300 if I link to a prompt, so this was surprising (prior to April I had fewer than 100 per day). Many of the new views were via Infidel linking to my fireworks post (thanks!), but most were in the “other” group, with no referring URL or keyword noted. Loads of views were from Portugal and Brazil. Does this have something to do with the World Cup? I never mention sports! So, I don’t know what’s going on or how people are finding Light Motifs when I don’t have the “allow search engines to find your blog” box checked off in settings.
Just like back on Wordpress, the massive increase in page views doesn’t translate into comments. I’ve been receiving about the same amount of comments as usual despite the surge in views. It seems that people hit up the blog, check out the first post, and immediately lose interest. Or maybe they’re bots, but how would bots get here if I don’t show up in a search?
I know, I know… the stats are as meaningless as they’ve always been, but they do spark my curiosity.
For the last few years, I and many other bloggers have been getting large bursts of page views from implausible countries like Singapore or Hong Kong. Mine are occasionally attributed to France as well. I've concluded that these are "AI" scraper bots using the text of blog posts to train LLMs. When my stat counter tells me I have more page views from Singapore than from the whole US. that obviously isn't real.
ReplyDeleteI've found that when I mentally adjust the stats by subtracting the page views from countries where it's not plausible I have that many readers (countries that are tiny, or have never shown such a large audience before), the remaining number is consistent across time and represents plausible growth from the number of views I regularly got before the "AI" plague. So I assume that that's the number of actual non-bot readers.
Of course, a blog does sometimes get a legitimate surge if a post is linked from some other source. I've heard from other bloggers that they see a noticeable increase if they're in my link round-ups, and that was also the case before the "AI" plague. So you can assume those are real. I've tried to encourage people who like something they find via the round-ups to leave comments there, so the blogger will know their post was appreciated, but for some reason most people don't seem to do that.
I agree with Infidel. I've been getting a lot of page views recently and a lot of spam comments that I've had to delete.
ReplyDeleteI don't really look at my stats. I wonder what the counter is picking up.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely bots! It's plague on the internet.
ReplyDeleteI had 30,000 views in one day last month which is unreal! It sounds for sure as if it's an AI thing. I used to get 25 views a day but since I started commenting more on others' blogs and doing link ups, I have many, many more views than that on average (though not 30,000 normally!). I don't check stats as far as where they're coming from...
ReplyDeleteI had to train- myself not to look at page views because it was always dismal. I felt lucky if I got a few comments. Guess what? I don't miss blogging. - Nat
ReplyDelete