Analytics Discourage Creativity
March 16, 2023
Wow it feels so freeing just logging on here and writing! I have no idea how many people viewed my last post and I think it's better that I don't. I feel like my mind was focused on the stats and it was getting in the way of me writing the next post. I guess I must worry a little too much about how people will react? This experience has got me thinking about the internet in general and all of the blogs and websites out there, of which there are probably hundreds of millions, possibly billions? Okay had to look it up and according to this article there's apparently over 600 million blogs in the world. WOW. That's a lot of blogs!
My experience getting distracted by blog stats has made me curious about most people's process of writing a blog post. I know most articles I look up about blogging talk about ways to make money off of having a blog and things you can do to get a search engine to notice you exist. It's honestly depressing. I feel like that's how most blogs end up writing almost the exact same article with the same formatting. It all ends up having no personality, nothing that sets it apart from other blogs. For me I know I was thinking too much about the readers of my blog instead of focusing on what I wanted to write. Which meant I kept putting off writing the next post because I was worried that the next post wouldn't get as many views. Which is ridiculous! I started the WordPress blog because I wanted to write and then it turned into being about the numbers of views I got on my posts. And so I'm now of the opinion that stats and analytics stifle creativity and innovation. If you write something based off of what is safe and will get a certain amount of numbers, you're not doing anything new or risky or innovative. And then all of the content becomes the same old stuff that's already been written before. I feel like this explains a lot of the blogs I've come across on the internet.
And from the perspective of a reader and as a human who browses the internet often (probably too much now that I think about it) it means that it's really hard to find an article that has new information in it and hasn't already been written. It means I end up reading about the first quarter of an article before realizing it says the exact same thing the last blog I was looking at said and then leaving the website altogether. But they got towards the top of the search results right? So it must mean they're successful? I guess I should be following their "blueprint" for success and then my blog will magically end up on the first page of Google results too ( but for some reason I feel like that's highly unlikely)! I would rather my metric for success not be how many page views I get or how to get Google to list me further up on the page results. I think my way of measuring success with blogging will be how many blog posts I've written and if I feel like I'm writing high quality content and writing content that's true to me. And what qualifies as high quality content isn't something someone told me in a blog article I should be writing about.
I feel like this is a great place to conclude the blog post. If you enjoyed reading it then you can subscribe to my blog via the RSS feed. Thank you to whoever is reading this for taking the time to read what I wrote.
My experience getting distracted by blog stats has made me curious about most people's process of writing a blog post. I know most articles I look up about blogging talk about ways to make money off of having a blog and things you can do to get a search engine to notice you exist. It's honestly depressing. I feel like that's how most blogs end up writing almost the exact same article with the same formatting. It all ends up having no personality, nothing that sets it apart from other blogs. For me I know I was thinking too much about the readers of my blog instead of focusing on what I wanted to write. Which meant I kept putting off writing the next post because I was worried that the next post wouldn't get as many views. Which is ridiculous! I started the WordPress blog because I wanted to write and then it turned into being about the numbers of views I got on my posts. And so I'm now of the opinion that stats and analytics stifle creativity and innovation. If you write something based off of what is safe and will get a certain amount of numbers, you're not doing anything new or risky or innovative. And then all of the content becomes the same old stuff that's already been written before. I feel like this explains a lot of the blogs I've come across on the internet.
And from the perspective of a reader and as a human who browses the internet often (probably too much now that I think about it) it means that it's really hard to find an article that has new information in it and hasn't already been written. It means I end up reading about the first quarter of an article before realizing it says the exact same thing the last blog I was looking at said and then leaving the website altogether. But they got towards the top of the search results right? So it must mean they're successful? I guess I should be following their "blueprint" for success and then my blog will magically end up on the first page of Google results too ( but for some reason I feel like that's highly unlikely)! I would rather my metric for success not be how many page views I get or how to get Google to list me further up on the page results. I think my way of measuring success with blogging will be how many blog posts I've written and if I feel like I'm writing high quality content and writing content that's true to me. And what qualifies as high quality content isn't something someone told me in a blog article I should be writing about.
I feel like this is a great place to conclude the blog post. If you enjoyed reading it then you can subscribe to my blog via the RSS feed. Thank you to whoever is reading this for taking the time to read what I wrote.