Blaugust 2019 Wrapup, Part 3 – Statistics

The Blog

Here I present the reason you should never pay attention to statistics when blogging. My views actually went down during Blaugust 2018, and went down even more during Blaugust 2019.

I also offer this chart as evidence that the “you have to blog every day to build an audience” advice is completely obsolete. Blogging every day is strictly for fun and/or personal growth. Building an audience is accomplished by networking, and is largely unrelated to the content you produce. As always in life, it’s never what you know, it’s who you know.

Of course when we chart WordPress Likes and Comments, it’s a totally different story.

I’m not an expert on blog traffic statistics, but from these numbers I would conclude that the “views” chart is mostly a product of Google searches from random strangers, more-or-less the potential to reach a new audience, while the Likes and Comments charts are the result of individual returning readers who stop by on a daily basis.

The Channel

In case anyone out there is still confused about why people switch from making high-quality videos on YouTube to livestreaming terrible quality videos on Twitch or anywhere else, here are a few numbers from my recent livestreams.

I don’t know if anyone will be able to read those numbers on whatever device you’re reading this on, but the individual views on the top 10 livestreams are: 49, 16, 15, 13, 12, 10, 10, 9, 8, 8, or a total of 150.

For comparison, here are some numbers from the Bloodborne series I just finished uploading during Blaugust.

That’s 14, 7, 6, 6, 6, 6, 5, 5, 5, and the next one not shown is 4, for a total of 64 on the top 10 Bloodborne videos.

And for even more comparison and perhaps most damning of all, here are some numbers from the Sekiro videos I uploaded in June, a very popular recent game that surely should have garnered a lot more search attention than Bloodborne.

That’s 11, 8, 8, 7, 6, 6, 6, 5, and 4 and 4 on the next two not shown, for a total of 65 on the top 10 Sekiro videos.

I slaved over those Bloodborne and Sekiro videos, making sure they were the highest possible video and audio quality. My Bloodborne series is probably the best I’ve ever done, once you get past a few technical glitches at the beginning from recording PS4 gameplay for the first time. The numbers for those videos are actually pretty good in comparison to previous videos, because I’m usually lucky to get 1 or 2 views on new uploads. Almost all of my YouTube views come from searches, years later.

But I did almost no work on those livestream videos. They are far worse quality. I literally just sat down in a chair, pressed the “start streaming” button, played for more-or-less an hour, then walked away. And those view numbers are astounding. 49 views in a month for an obscure MMO? And most of those were in the first week? What the what?

It’s no wonder everyone blew off making Let’s Play videos and switched to livestreaming. Consumers who demand quality in their content consumption are apparently a dying breed.

I’ll end with my YouTube channel analytics “overview” page for 2019 so far.

It’s hard to read much into that line graph but it seems to be trending upward, and it seems slightly improved during the Steam Backlog Bonanza and Blaugust. The channel has been very, very slowly gaining an audience since I started it, but the growth seems to be accelerating ever so slightly.

But for some reason people still really like my Morrowind videos. Go figure. Someday I need to finish that game.