According to my Typepad Dashboard, yesterday TOP got 150,860 visitors.
Unfortunately, that has to be a glitch. That's more than double my all-time record for daily visitors, and it's nearly thirty times the average traffic for the past week. Furthermore, it's not reflected in the number of comments, Affiliate looks, or Referrers. I've asked Typepad to correct the error and remove the result from my recent stats.
Sigh. I would love to have that many viewers. Unfortunately, to accomplish that, I'd have to be making videos, writing only about products, and relentlessly structuring my my content as clickbait—not only in the title, but in the body of the content.
And if I did that, you probably wouldn't be here.
Still, it would be nice. Here's to illusions!
Mike
Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
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Just curious, what is considered a "visitor" in terms of numbers? If I check the site 4 times, is that calculated as 4 visitors or does it have a way of determining the source of the visitor and then only using the multiple visits as one visit?
Maybe people are weathered in and filling their day with repeated clicks on the site to kill time. We're under a week long heat bubble and going outside is horrible, so I know I click on about a half a dozen sites (including this one) a half a dozen times a day just to stay inside in the air conditioning. Hope that doesn't skew your numbers.
Posted by: Albert Smith | Saturday, 12 August 2023 at 10:06 PM
my my
Posted by: Blind | Saturday, 12 August 2023 at 10:40 PM
Do you have access to Google search console for your site? I spike is certainly possible if you suddenly ranked for something
Posted by: Jay Salisbury | Sunday, 13 August 2023 at 12:19 AM
Check your Google analytics. That will highlight any anomalies in the distribution of visits - geographic for example
Posted by: Richard Tugwell | Sunday, 13 August 2023 at 03:03 AM
Hi Mike, maybe it is due to the popularity of Bromley's BBC LS3/5A loudspeakers...
... I'm joking. :)
Bromley in SE London, has played host to some famous manufacturers, including Tannoy, Rogers and Lowther.
The Linn Sara's are far superior anyway, just a little bit bigger in volume, and substantially bigger regarding bass, midrange and treble.
In short, one of the best and sweetest hi-fi performers of all time.
https://www.canuckaudiomart.com/details/104875-linn_sara_speakers/images/106723/
As long as one uses an amplifier that can handle the range, which goes beyond what the human ear can detect...
https://www.hifianswers.com/2021/10/linn-what-they-said-about-the-sara-speakers/
Both the originals which employed a cannon connector and the 9's which adopted the usual banana connector, performed with aplomb, and I have owned both.
I tried a pair of full sized Isobarik's in between my two pairs of Sara's, and good as they are, they do rather impose on the average British living room, which is usually not that big.
As I said a few days back, the Kans, like the LS3/5a have very little bass, and are more suitable for a recording studio.
Anyway, congratulations on your reported popularity, whether real or erroneous, I know I have been reading for a very long time, and will continue to do so.
Posted by: Stephen Jenner | Sunday, 13 August 2023 at 03:52 AM
Oh, and BTW, the best amplifier that I have heard is the Electrocompaniet "2 Channel Audio Power Amplifier", unfortunately it had a habit of burning its transistors and much of the internal wiring along with them.
The amplifying process involves a delicate balancing act between stability and instability, which is why there have been many duds along with the diamonds.
A friend who owns a well regarded HiFi shop, has three of them, one being repaired, one in reserve and one in use, he constantly recycles them.
I have one, but it has been away for repair by a friend for a few years now, somehow the subject of WHEN never really comes up when we meet, so I doubt whether I will ever see it again.
Incidentally, this friend's now passed father was the man who invented (and whose employer AEI, patented) the method of using acid and wax to etch printed circuit boards. The patent had been displayed in the National Science Museum in Kensington, but has now been languishing in their vaults for many years.
Posted by: Stephen Jenner | Sunday, 13 August 2023 at 04:19 AM
A suggestion that you show more books from Amazon in your posts, for click throughs, if nothing else. I order occasionally from B&H but very frequently from Amazon for local unobtanium but I have to search back through multiple posts until I find a book recommendation link.
Posted by: George Housley | Sunday, 13 August 2023 at 10:17 AM
I occasionally get those wild upward spikes on blogspot as well, sometimes lasting for weeks; they usually seem to coincide with an audience spike from some foreign, non English speaking country for no apparent, discernible reason. I can only assume that someone is tampering with the goods somehow, someway in some basic, hi-tech manner I will never ascertain. It has never affected my blog's operation, I just wonder if someone's profiting from it in some nefarious way, and hope no one is getting hurt by it in the process...
Sometimes I play with the idea of doing parody photo videos, but then realize no one would be able to tell the difference...
Posted by: Stan B. | Sunday, 13 August 2023 at 02:13 PM
Not to sound too conspiratorial, but it is likely that your recent inquiry to the CIA public affairs office was intercepted by Russian and/or Chinese intelligence services, which then probed your site minutely in the belief that it must contain U.S. national secrets. So in my opinion, you have every reason to take credit for that spike in Web activity, and deserve the thanks of a grateful nation for keeping the foreign spies unproductively occupied. Well done!
Posted by: Chris Kern | Sunday, 13 August 2023 at 02:22 PM
AI training perhaps?
Posted by: JH | Sunday, 13 August 2023 at 03:39 PM
The good old times of blogging with soaring numbers of visitors... long gone. Oh well (as a certain M.J. uses to write)
The blogging landscape has suffered severely from the advent of the "social media", when a lot of photographers jumped ship in favour of instagram and the like, and the erosion since then has not stopped. The dwindling support for feeds by the big companies, the demise of curating and aggregating websites has left holes in the landscape, that were never filled again. And the war of the search engines - for the moment definitely decided in favour of google - left the blogosphere as collateral damage, as the emphasis has changed from information brokerage to closed shop business models.
What I discovered recently when asking different search engines for links to reviews for a lens: Google tries to show me results mainly for shops offering the lens... and youtube reviews. It seems their algorithms try to keep you within the spheres that are relevant in terms of advertisements for them.
Other search engines (I tried startpage and duckduckgo) behave less greedy, most probably due to their different business models.
So styling the content for the preferences of google is certainly a way to success. The difficulty lies in the task of keeping the content true and interesting enough in order to keep the loyal readers. Up to now, T.O.P. did a good job on the latter. With the advent of the stochastic parrots aka "artificial intelligence" the blogosphere, too, will change again, I guess. If google lets Bard answer most of the questions, links to original content most probably will become sidelined. *That* might be the real and maybe final challenge.
Posted by: Markus | Sunday, 13 August 2023 at 03:47 PM
I think Stephen Jenner points in the right direction. But to bring it back to photography, Bromley, then in Kent not London, was home to Wray (Optical Works) Ltd makers of lenses, binoculars and cameras. A less well known company perhaps but their works were near my school and I have and use a pair of their binoculars.
Posted by: Richard Parkin | Sunday, 13 August 2023 at 03:55 PM
It's a glitch, I'm sure. I'm with Typepad too, and I got more than a month's worth of page views on the 11th for both my blogs.
One blog is up and running and the other one hasn't been updated in four years.
Posted by: Roger Bradbury | Monday, 14 August 2023 at 06:02 AM
Hmm. I think you may have unintentionally written a post on one of those "existential" questions that keep online forum threads going for years and years, complete with a somewhat click-baity title.
Posted by: robert e | Monday, 14 August 2023 at 08:44 AM
Long time reader here, and hello Mike. I have always thought that if you were a bit more active on social media, such as routinely posting links each morning (timing matters), and having an interesting avatar on Twitter (X), for example, you would see more visits with little to no real extra labor. Not 30x more, to be sure, but you might slowly gain more traction this way, finding a bigger audience of people who appreciate what you do the way those of us who already follow you do
Howard French
Posted by: Howard French | Monday, 14 August 2023 at 09:09 AM