Monday, April 25, 2005

9-1/2 weeks

Well a few minutes ago I went over the 25000 unique visitor mark since I started the blog on Feb. 14th.

YEAH ME!

A couple of my online friends have recently started blogs (I'll link to them once they have some content); and we were talking about blogs and blogging on the NoR forums related to this the other day.

A commenter said: Chris, you sound like you really get into blogging. What,do you make a living doing it or something? :P

Don't I wish...

Well actually no, not really. I've been a freelance magazine writer before (Tech Republic, Gartner, IDG, a couple others during the .com boom), and it's a pain in the ass.

When the money was good ($0.35 a word), it was well worth it, but now the money is shit ($0.07 or so, $0.12 if you're damned good or slightly famous).

I used to crank out 4-7000 words a week at $0.35 a word, in addition to my "real job"; and man it was a good thing.

Now I'm putting out ... probably more actually (and that's not including the several thousand words a week I write up on the NoR), and I'm not getting paid at all; but at least I get to vent, which keeps me something close to sane.

I get between 300 and 500 uniques on a typical day, with 1500-3500 on a day the instapundit links me (happened 8 times so far, once directly the rest as part of carnivals; and it will certainly happen the next time I host the carnival of cordite), and 1500-2500 if Kim DuToit links me. The day they both linked me I got 5000 hits.

I've had 25,000 uniques, and 50,000 page views in the nine-1/2 weeks since I started this blog. The previous 12 years I had a website, I had a total of about 150k uniques.

I guess people like what they read; they keep coming back for more.