Does anyone read your website?

My girlfriend recently asked me this question, and I had no great way of answering it. I don't have any analytics or tracking on my website. Analytics are a slippery slope for me, so I try to avoid looking at them as much as possible.

You see, I used to have a somewhat popular YouTube channel for gaming videos. It got up to about 15,000 subscribers and had over 1,000,000 total views across (if memory serves) 200 videos. Not bad, right? It might have been my underdeveloped brain (I was somewhere between 15 and 18 at the time), but it stressed me the fuck out, man.

I realized that number-chasing feels good when it works. But when it doesn't, I plummet into a deep valley of self-doubt and depression. So after going through that cycle a couple of times, I quit. I made maybe 2-3 videos over a year for things that still interested me, and after that it slowly fizzed out. It felt... oddly nice? To let go of the numbers; to let go of the audience demand; to finally play the game for fun again instead of for content.

Anyway, back to the website. Turns out Cloudflare gives me some basic analytics. And while I still just publish for the sake of writing and not for "making number go big", I was surprised at the amount of unique visitors this site gets!

Guess I just needed to get that off my chest. Time to close Cloudflare's analytics again and not open it up for another 5 years or so. 🙂

That doesn't mean I don't care about the people that read my blog. Matter of fact, I'd love to know a bit more about you! So, if you read this, I'd love for you to send me an email. Tell me something about yourself, something interesting you did or made recently, or just to say hello!