It's been the most successful month ever on diamond geezer, by which I mean the month with the most visitors, not necessarily the month you've enjoyed most. For several years this blog has averaged about 70,000 visitors a month, then in April it finally nudged over 80,000 (thanks to my report on candy stores in Oxford Street), and ridiculously my May total is 129,000. That's over 50% better than any previous month.
It's partly Crossrail's fault because fresh railway content often proves very popular. A few excitable tweets or getting listed in a weekly roundup can bring all and sundry to the blog, more in faith than expectation, and hopefully what they find ultimately delivers. This month people have been getting particularly excited about opening dates, interchange times, purple signage and the new tube map, indeed by the time the new line opened last Tuesday I was well on track for a record total.
Then on Thursday I published a post called How To Walk Underground from Liverpool Street to Farringdon, which got linked by an American newsfeed and suddenly the floodgates opened. Their general verdict was that I hadn't walked the whole way so the title was misleading and they were very disappointed, but by then it was too late, they'd chalked up a visit. By the end of Friday I'd had my 2nd most successful day ever with just shy of 10,000 visitors, but only by vastly overpromising in the title. This alas is why certain media outlets write clickbait headlines for almost everything they publish, because exaggerating up front pays absolute dividends.
Saturday however brought 24,500 visitors, which didn't so much beat my daily record as smash it out of the park. Oddly it had nothing at all to do with Crossrail but something random I wrote two years ago under the strictures of lockdown. Someone on a subreddit called "What is this thing?", which has 2 million members, posted a photo of a tree and asked "Anyone know what this metal ring around the tree is for?" It turned out to be one of the History Trees in the Olympic Park, so my May 2020 post got linked in response and shedloads of global visitors turned up to read about something they'll likely never see.
I get no financial recompense from this blog so these high numbers are all mostly meaningless. I'm much more interested in how many people come back on a regular basis rather than parachute in to read one page and never return. But every regular reader has to start somewhere, and hopefully a few will stick around to read about obscure London suburbs, badly designed infrastructure and trips to the seaside.
