: Sometime this morning, probably around nine o'clock, diamond geezer will receive its nine millionth visitor. More accurately it'll be the nine millionth time that a slightly ropey stats package has registered a unique visit, which totally isn't the same thing, but still very much worth celebrating. Nine million visits is an impressive total - the equivalent of everyone in London reading my blog once. But viewed another way it's not much - on average two busy tube trains of readers a day (or 12 busy tube trains under current circumstances). What I do know is that my audience is coming faster. The first million took five and a half years, the last million's taken fourteen months.
What I've traditionally done, each time one of these millionaire milestones rolls by, is 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 hugely important, back in the era when blogs thrived solely because other blogs linked to them, but times change. Blogs no longer have a fraction of the traction they enjoyed a decade ago now that social media is king, because the ability to drive traffic has shifted away from those who generate their own content towards those who merely digest the content of others.
My league table therefore 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. I'm only bothering with a top 10 these days, rather than the traditional top 20, because the teens are even more stagnant than this.
Almost nothing has changed. The top three are still social media platforms rather than blogs, with Twitter at the top of the heap. I don't tweet about my blog much, and nor do many others, but my bot account @diamondgzrblog automatically tweets each new blog post to a small daily audience and that's helped rack up the clicks. Reddit hasn't been anywhere near as excitable of late, now that most of its tube geeks have been siphoned off into a minor subreddit, so its second place is mostly a reflection of past supernovae. And I still don't understand how Facebook is sending so many people here because I'm not on it (the only feed I can see is a substandard unformatted scrape, which I wish someone would delete).
Girl With A One Track Mind, Gunner-tastic Arseblog and Tom's defunct Random acts of reality are only here because they were massive in the mid 2000s and nothing else has come along to dislodge them since. Londonist evolved beyond bloggage many years ago, and still occasionally links here, although I get most visitors when they retweet their 'How Long Does The Oyster Card Have Left?' article for the umpteenth time. London Reconnections has gone relatively quiet of late, so remains in eighth place, while Blue Witch's presence confirms the staying power of old-school blogging. Some of us carry on writing stuff simply because we want to.
And congratulations to Ian Visits for finally cracking the top 10, nine years after first entering the top 100. His regular weekly railway news round-ups often link here if I've written something tube related, sending hundreds of extra visitors my way, hence the leap of four places. I'm not writing about travelling so much these days, or indeed travelling myself, so that influx may now diminish. But thanks anyway Ian, because these days it's harder to be heard above the social media buzz than ever before, and if blogs don't link to other blogs then nobody else is going to.
But the vast majority of my last million readers didn't click in from anywhere, they rely on force of habit. I've hit nine million by being reliable rather than clickable, because there'll almost certainly be a new post to read every morning which hopefully you'll want to read. So I don't mind where my nine 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...
