The case against worrying about your posts' analytics
I've had several conversations recently wherein my interlocutor has said that they tried writing online, got very few readers on their posts, and gave up (or, at least, feel discouraged about it). I think it's usually a mistake to worry about low readership on a post:
- As Patrick McKenzie has said repeatedly,1 much of the public, professional value of having written something is totally independent of its analytics. Simply being able to provably say you've thought about something before has a lot of value (e.g., in job applications).
- It's good to write, and most of the reasons for this (e.g., its forcing you to clarify your thoughts) are independent of the number of readers a piece has. (I would say more, but you've probably seen many arguments to this effect.)
- Even if your goal is influence, maximizing the number of readers is usually not the best way to get it. Saying something that is useful and intelligible in a niche is not just better but more influential than getting a lot of low-quality clicks on something that will barely be processed and not be remembered.
- Even if your goal is money, most of the best ways to turn writing into money do not involve getting lots of clicks on posts.
- Even if you want high reader counts, writing online can be cumulative, and cumulative in unexpected ways. Low-traffic posts can be an important catalyst for, or supporting link in, a future, more popular post. They can also build trust and credibility in other, indirect ways (e.g., by establishing that you've been around a while).
- Even if you want high reader counts, there is a large, seemingly random component to post popularity. Many of us have no good way to predict which of our posts will be more and less popular. To the (small) extent I care about analytics, I view my posts in large part as lottery tickets. Most of them are not attention-winners.
- People use RSS readers, and analytics tools can be quirky, so you usually can't be sure your readership is as low as you think it is.
So: analytics dashboards are a tempting scorecard, but they usually aren't measuring what you have reason to care about.
I imagine that a lot of this post is internalized patio11 teachings, but his way of looking at this is so deeply ingrained in certain subcultures that it's hard to find specific citations. Actually, it's so ingrained that I hadn't thought to write this down until I found myself having this conversation repeatedly.↩