{"id":2203,"date":"2013-02-09T14:09:01","date_gmt":"2013-02-09T05:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2013-02-09\/2203"},"modified":"2013-02-09T23:27:35","modified_gmt":"2013-02-09T14:27:35","slug":"the-colossal-battle-of-pageviews-xkcd-vs-reddit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2013-02-09\/2203","title":{"rendered":"The Colossal Battle of Pageviews: xkcd vs. Reddit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Voigtl\u00e4nder 125mm f\/2.5 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>400 sec, f<\/span>\/2.5, ISO 400 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nAlien Landscape<\/span>\nmoss on a snow-covered stone lantern\n
Desktop-Background Versions<\/b>\n1280×<\/span>800<\/a>  ·  1680×<\/span>1050<\/a>  ·  1920×<\/span>1200<\/a>  ·  2560×<\/span>1600<\/a>  ·  2880×<\/span>1800<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

I'm adamant about keeping my blog content what\n I<\/i> <\/u> want to share; I hope<\/span> others will happen to\nlike it, of course, but I don't<\/span> “pander for\n pageviews”,<\/span>*<\/a><\/span>\n\ndespite having been called an attention\nwhore<\/a> by a random<\/span> Internet anonymous coward\nthe other day. \ud83d\ude42  So, I don't<\/span> often pay much\nattention to my blog's pageview statistics, and I often<\/span> go months without\neven seeing them, but I've looked at them this past week, and the results\nare interesting.<\/p>\n\n

The photos on today's post, by the way, have nothing to do with the\ntext; I just<\/span> wanted to include some pictures, so I'm including a few<\/span> shots I\ntook<\/span> in the light snow yesterday at Nishimura Stone Lanterns (\u897f\u6751\u77f3\u706f\u7c60)<\/span><\/a> in north-east Kyoto Japan.<\/p>\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Voigtl\u00e4nder 125mm f\/2.5 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>400 sec, f<\/span>\/2.5, ISO 1400 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nFrom Above<\/span>\n<\/div>\n\n

Most regular readers of my blog don't actually visit my blog directly; rather, they\nread the full-text feed via Google Reader or the like, so I get<\/span> no pageviews at all from\nthem. Instead, the biggest driver of my blog traffic is the collection of\noutside links to specific posts that has developed organically over time,\nsuch as (for example) the many links to my camera autofocus\ntest chart<\/a> that have appeared on camera forums around the world in the\nyears since I wrote<\/span> it. Lots of article views come via<\/a> random web searches<\/a> as well.\nOverall, I've been running a steady<\/span> 300,000 article views a month<\/span> for\nyears.<\/p>\n\n

But occasionally a specific post garners special short-term attention,\nsuch as when last week's “Disappointed in Fstoppers.com: Wholesale Copyright Infringement\nas a Business<\/span> Model<\/a>” was mentioned\non reddit.com<\/a>. This caused a huge<\/span> spike in article pageviews for a few<\/span>\ndays. I don't<\/span> use reddit.com, but it calls itself “the front page of the\ninternet”, so it's not surprising to see a jump<\/span> in traffic from them.<\/p>\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Voigtl\u00e4nder 125mm f\/2.5 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>400 sec, f<\/span>\/2.5, ISO 1250 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nFrom The Side<\/span>\nthough a different kind of moss\n<\/div>\n\n\n

So it makes for an interesting comparison to see the effect of having\nthe subject of a six<\/span>-year-old blog post tangentially referenced by Randall\nMunroe's xkcd.com, in his “Perl Problems<\/a>” cartoon yesterday. If you don<\/span>'t\nknow xkcd.com<\/a>, its tagline is “A\nwebcomic<\/span> of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” That doesn't quite sound\nas sweeping and impressive and popular as “front page of the internet”,\ndoes it?<\/p>\n\n

The jump in traffic? 30× that of the reddit jump from last\nweek. Not thirty<\/span> percent... thirty times<\/i>.<\/p>\n\n

Keep in mind that my blog is not even referenced in the cartoon,\nwhere there are no links at all. Merely, the cartoon makes an indirect, obscure reference\nto a subject<\/span> that I covered<\/span> in an article in 2006<\/a>, itself related\nto a book<\/span> I wrote<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

So, folks\ndiscussing the cartoon at places like this<\/a> and this<\/a> make\nreference to that blog post, and here we are.<\/p>\n\n

(Muddying the comparison a bit is the fact that my old article has\nsurfaced at reddit here<\/a>,\nhere<\/a>,\nand here<\/a>,\nbut as of this writing, the resulting pageviews from them are not\nmaterial.)<\/p>\n\n

I have been a regular reader of xkcd for years, and often find it brilliant, insightful,\nand downright awe-inspiring amazing<\/i>, but for me this\nparticular cartoon was a dud<\/span> because I didn't<\/span> understand the other<\/i> obscure reference\nthe cartoon played upon (which, I find out<\/span> later, turns out to be related to some modern rap singer).\nOf course, I immediately<\/span> recognized the connection to my six-year-old blog post,\n“Source of the famous “Now you\nhave two problems” quote<\/a>”, but lacking a pedigree<\/span> in American rap music,\nI didn't<\/span> understand the cartoon.<\/p>\n\n

That's how it is with Randall's cartoons: they make absolutely no sense\nif you don't understand the often obscure references, but tend to be\nbrilliant when you do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Voigtl\u00e4nder 125mm f\/2.5 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>400 sec, f<\/span>\/2.5, ISO 560 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\n
Vertical Desktop-Background Versions<\/b>\n\n\n1050×<\/span>1680<\/a>  ·  1200×<\/span>1920<\/a>  ·  1600×<\/span>2560<\/a><\/small><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

*<\/i><\/a> but I'm totally<\/i> pandering with today's article title.<\/small>\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I'm adamant about keeping my blog content what  I  want to share; I hope others will happen to like it, of course, but I don't \"pander for pageviews\",* despite having been called an attention whore by a random Internet anonymous coward the other day. \ud83d\ude42  So, I don't often pay much attention to my blog's pageview statistics, and I often go months without even seeing them, but I've looked at them this past week, and the results are interesting.<\/p>

The photos on today's post, by the way, have nothing to do with the text; I just wanted to include some [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2,23,6,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2203"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}