Europe sure seems to like The Audient.
What other way to explain the huge spike in my readership while I was on my trip?
Of course, there are likely other ways to explain it. But you should know that I am not a blogger who uses any sort of the analytical tools made available to bloggers, tries to increase readership. I don't ever talk about my posts on social media, with two lone exceptions per year, which are my year-end rankings and my annual portmanteaus posts. I kind of hope that anyone who checks in on those might stay for the other content, but I don't do anything the other 363 days to build that or promote the blog in any way.
But I do like looking at the number of page hits I've gotten on my posts, just as a casual thing.
My readership has been down since I got back. Way down. My first post after returning, written on October 4th, has 34 views. (As a side note, I'm not sure exactly what registers a view. Do they have to click directly on a link? I would think so, but what about those who come to the top of the page and then scroll down?) My next post has 48, which is my high since returning, and all the subsequent posts have 31 or fewer. Yesterday's has only ten so far.
This wouldn't alarm me in normal times, and is keeping with a general pattern. I have some loyal readers who check in on me no matter what, and who I suspect get notified when I have a new post up. Thank you. I appreciate you, big time.
Over time, the numbers on each post tend to go up so they come in at somewhere under 100. Consider the posts in the first half of August before I left, which all have between 65 and 106 views. I'm very happy with that, it's more than enough people looking at my words to keep doing it. (In fact, much as I love you, I don't really write this for you anyway. I'd probably write it even if no one was reading it.)
When I say my readership since returning is "way down," I mean only compared to the phenomenon I'm about to describe to you.
After my post of August 17th, we start to see an interesting pattern. The numbers go up significantly for the final two posts I wrote before I left.
The first is "Paying $20 for multiple Eddington gains," which has 142 page views. I can reason out that one. Eddington was a film that a lot of people talked about at the time it came out. Maybe people who still had a little room in their stomach for more discussion gravitated toward it when they saw I had written about it. (Though they may have been disappointed, as the post was mostly about why I was willing to shell out the premium rental price: so I could review it the first week of my trip as well as catch up on podcasts where it was being discussed.)
The really notable spike, though, came in the post I wrote on the day I departed, announcing the trip. That was "Holiday ro-OOOO-oooo-ooo ... um, uh, OOOO ... ooooooo ... oooooad." and it has a staggering 316 views. (Staggering by my standards, of course, not objectively staggering.)
This one I can't reason out. The poster was for National Lampoon's European Vacation, not a movie anyone should have any reason to be talking about or even thinking about in 2025. The title was an SEO unfriendly gobbledegook meant to approximate Kenny Loggins singing. And the content was just an announcement about a six-week trip to Europe.
316 views?
The boost continued in Europe. I won't continue to link the posts, but I'll list the dates, post titles and page views:
8/30 - 8,000 channels and nuthin' on - 135 views
8/31 - Why do movie characters where college shirts to bed? - 124 views
9/3 - A vacation movie intersecting with my personal film/music history - 115 views
9/4 - Something Bri-ish to watch in London - 110 views
9/5 - Feast or famine in holiday review posting - 168 views
9/6 - A quick survey of French movie posters - 467 views (!!!)
9/14 - Squeezing in a Barcelona movie - 228 views
9/16 - A quarter baked - 145 views
9/17 - R.I.P. Robert Redford - 121 views
9/18 - Flirtations with Italian cinema history - 114 views
9/19 - Late deliveries to Italy - 209 views
9/22 - I finally saw: She's All That (sort of) - 40 views
9/24 - From Paris (Texas) to Cairo (Illinois) to Athens (Georgia) - 111 views
9/25 - Non-documentary colons - 190 views
9/28 - Understanding Editing: The Right Stuff - 92 views
9/30 - Slim pickings for Greek cinema - 144 views
Sixteen posts in about 42 days away, not too shabby, especially when it took me a while to figure out how to properly download photos on my tablet.
I considered the idea that having a city or country name in the title of the post increased its prominence within search engines, but that doesn't explain all of what we're seeing. Several of the posts with geography in their titles are only slightly higher than the high end of where the rest of my posts eventually end up.
The one with nearly 500 views, about the French movie posters, must have attracted readers who are into movie posters, particularly French ones. This may have also disappointed them a little bit, since I wasn't talking about the posters for Jules and Jim or Breathless. I was talking about French language versions of posters for current Hollywood releases.
And then the fourth most views in this period is for a post about the colon in the title of Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain? Nothing to do with any country.
Also it's not just that my readership was generally elevated while I was gone. The post about She's All That still has, rightly, only 40 views. But the posts around it are all higher than my average. The poor performance of that post rules out notions like I was publishing posts at more optimal times on this trip, times that lined up more with the times my actual or potential readers want to read my posts. That theory especially doesn't hold water because my posting was not consistent in terms of times of day or days of the week. Some of these undoubtedly aligned with times people were ready to read The Audient, some of them clearly didn't. Just like when I'm posting from Australia.
So ... I don't know.
If any of you have an explanation, I'd love to hear it. But as of now, I don't think there's anything actionable from this data.
I could test it by intentionally including a country name in the title of a post, but that's not really what I'm about. Baiting and switching people is certainly not a good way to build readership. I do that often enough, unintentionally, without going out of my way to do it.
As with many things in this world, I think the answer is "Shrug?"
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