Hey, guys.

I've been posting fairly regularly on this site in the Blog section, as well as on other sites and forums, 4 to be precise. On every post, I get about 20-30 views on three of them and about 100-200 on the last one. When I post on GD.NET blog, however, things get an order of magnitude higher, about 350-400 views a day.

My question is how did I end up with these numbers? It's great to see numbers like this, but it's really abnormal to see such a staggering amount of views compared to other sites and forums. Sure, maybe this site brings more traffic, but it still doesn't answer the way too many views and very few comments. I'm genuinely trying to figure this out. Any guidance from veterans? Thank you in advance.

Indexing and archiving crawlers, spamming crawlers looking for email addresses and passwords or other finds, they show up as visitors since most software rules cannot identify them versus regular traffic. The bots hide that way by design, and it is true on all big sites. Then there are also humans paid to build fake profiles by visiting all the sites and clicking on links at a human pace.

There is a steady baseline of automated and human-run crawling traffic that hits everything, from steam wishlists to YouTube videos to blog posts. Some big companies are better able to filter it out, but even then some still slip through.

If you don't know about it, it looks inflated. Once you know the baseline for a site you can better establish what is popular with actual humans.

Thank you for the reply, that was very informative. Knowing this, makes it hard to precisely gauge how my devlog is actually doing. Sigh. Guess I can reasonably assume that only around 10% of views are people that are actually interested in the devlog.

Baftis said:
Sigh. Guess I can reasonably assume that only around 10% of views are people that are actually interested in the devlog.

Who knows - maybe bots will even buy our stuff in the future. First they'll become intelligent, then they get rights and money. Human made games will be their nerdy retro remainder about a confusing past of flesh and blood ancestors. ; )

I was looking up the blog frequently. Because of the curious level geometries. Even considered to reply and proposing you could make the wallride just work on curved walls.
But adding new posts on daily basis is probably too much. It becomes generic, and even if you had a truly new feature to announce, it would not stand out due to quantity.

Well, on one of your blogs you had 3 comments (all of them bots though ? ). No but seriously, I sometimes take a look at blogs here. The thing I usually find is that the blog is often about something very obscure that I don't have the context for. But more than that I am unsure if the blog is actually written by a human. There are currently a bunch of blog posts obviously written by a bot at the top of the page.

JoeJ said:
But adding new posts on daily basis is probably too much. It becomes generic, and even if you had a truly new feature to announce, it would not stand out due to quantity.

I did notice that if I put back to back posts (on consecutive days), view count more often tends to go down, but not always. I mean, the view count is literally a lottery: sometimes tends to go up, sometimes it tends to go down and you have no idea what's to come.

But about the standing out part: my experience shows something else. My most viewed post by a long margin is about a bug fix I tried to make and some testing. Literally the most mundane topic, and it got to be a top blog. Not to say it didn't baffle me, because it did and it still does. But for me, posting often (yes, sometimes on a daily basis) paid off.

perry_blueberry said:

But more than that I am unsure if the blog is actually written by a human.

Human here =)) shocker, right?

You said that the blog is often about something very obscure that you don't have the context for. Were you talking about mine specifically or in general? Either way, I'll make sure to make a mental note of it when I'm writing my next blog.

Baftis said:

perry_blueberry said:

But more than that I am unsure if the blog is actually written by a human.

Human here =)) shocker, right?

You said that the blog is often about something very obscure that you don't have the context for. Were you talking about mine specifically or in general? Either way, I'll make sure to make a mental note of it when I'm writing my next blog.

I didn't mean your blogs in particular. From when I've looked at the blogs here it seems they are often by someone who is writing their own game engine (not sure if this applies to you) and show some progress on the engine or implementing some part of a game in it. The problem is that I don't have the context for it so there isn't much I can take away from reading.

I think all blog posts would benefit from some sort of introduction to each post linking to some previous posts and have it say: “start here if you are new”. Then the post should clearly state what it is trying to achieve and then how it was achieved. I also think linking to other relevant material (algorithms, game design theory etc.) would make someone more interested in following a blog because then they can gain a broad understanding of a topic from just following the blogs.