Readership Survey (Updated)

I recent years, blogging has become a somewhat solitary exercise.  A few years ago blogging was a more communal activity.  Then came social media.  As a consequence, comments from readers have become increasingly rare whilst at the same time becoming all the more welcome.

I have my own reasons for writing this blog, and I'm not doing it for the glory, I just hope someone, somewhere gets pleasure from what I write.   But occasionally I do wonder about the breadth of my readership.

A recent spate of page views from the USA, then from Singapore, set me to wondering once again about my readership.  Since 2019 I've used the simple, in-built stats that come with Blogger but they don't help with anything other than bulk page views.

Update, Mon 19 June, 2023
The original version of this post included a brief online survey in an attempt to tackle the "big question" of how many of my page views are from bots, web scrappers, spammers or real people.

I promised I'd post any results I got and here they are.

• I received 11 replies in the first 6 days and none in the last 5.  
• During the "active" 6 days this post was viewed 190 times.
• During the same period the blog had 2,455 page views.

This makes drawing any real conclusions impossible but I thought you'd like to see what did emerge:

• 7 of 11 replies were from regular readers.  See!  I told you I had some.
• 8 readers had followed a link from another blog.
• The average rating was 4.0 out of 5.0 which wasn't bad at all.
• Only 2 readers were using RSS.
• There were 7 replies from the UK, 3 from the USA and 1 from Australia.

The survey hasn't really answered the "big question" other than suggest that lots of the page views are either automated or from "internet grazers".

Even so, it was an interesting experiment, and I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to reply.