: Earlier this week, around eleven o'clock on Wednesday evening, diamond geezer received its seven millionth visitor. More accurately it was the seven millionth time that a slightly ropey stats package had registered a unique visit, which isn't quite the same thing, but still very much worth celebrating. Seven million visits is an impressive total - the equivalent of everyone in Hong Kong reading my blog once. But viewed another way it's not much - on average one rush hour tube train of readers a day, which is barely 0.01% of the population of London. What I do know is that my audience is coming faster. The first million took just over five years, the last million's taken fourteen months.
What I like to do, every time one of these millionaire milestones rolls by, is to look back and analyse which sites my readers arrive from. In particular I like to draw up a league table of top linking blogs, ordered by volume of visitors clicking here from there. This used to be important, back in the era when blogs thrived solely because other blogs linked to them, but times change. Blogs no longer have the traction they enjoyed a decade ago, and the ability to drive traffic has wholly shifted, away from those who generate their own content towards those who merely digest the content of others.
So my regular linking league table again includes a range of websites broader than mere blogs, in particular three social media services that didn't exist when I started out, and which now dominate beyond expectation. My apologies if they've shoved your website down the table since my last league table in December 2016. I've also reduced the table from a top 20 to a top 10, sorry, because pretty much nothing is happening in the teens any more.
It says something for the power of the blogosphere in 2006 that Girl With A One Track Mind has only just been dislodged from the summit. Now Twitter takes the crown, the extra nudge being because I started up @diamondgzrblog (which tweets each new blog post), and not because lots of other people are linking. Reddit hasn't been quite so excitable of late, so slips back, while Facebook creeps up into fourth place (I'm not even on Facebook, so don't expect me to explain why).
Londonist is no longer a blog, but still sometimes links here (thanks for yesterday's), and I always get a little ripple every time they retweet that post on factual misconceptions from 2011. Gunner-tastic Arseblog and über-transport site London Reconnections once had blogrolls which brought visitors here, but no longer do, and award-winning Scaryduck barely posts any more (you should be following Alistair on Twitter instead). Which leaves Blue Witch, currently sunning herself in South Africa, nudging back into the list because she still blogs and the previous Number 10 no longer exists.
Yes, some of us carry on writing stuff because we want to, even if it's harder to be heard above the social media buzz than ever before. And you lot keep reading, generally without needing a nudge from elsewhere, which is particularly nice. So I don't mind where my seven million came from, I'm just well chuffed that you still bother turning up. Thanks to all of you, and here's to millions more...
