Usually, when I’m curious about who finds my blog and what they’re looking for, I check my Google Analytics. It rarely shows me anything I didn’t already know, honestly; for instance, most people find my blog by searching for either CC’s Archibald Barasol joke, t-shirt surgery, or the lyrics for “What the Fuck Chuck” by the Phunk Junkeez.
One thing I’d forgotten, though, is that Google Analytics only works for pages on which I’ve stuck its code; that is, only on my blog proper. This evening, I checked my server’s AWStats page to see usage/hit stats on everything in the dianaschnuth.com domain, including all my archived websites of old. What I found was intriguing.
My top referrer so far this year? A Wikipedia article on the RCA tape cartridge (1958-1964). Back in college, I had a brief fascination with audio recording media, including various cassette media. I created a small sub-site on my personal homepage (circa 1998) that housed all the research I’d done, including a page on this oversized early cassette tape by RCA.
It’s a damn shame I didn’t notice earlier that the Back link was broken. This was an archive of a page I hadn’t touched in YEARS, but wanted to keep for posterity (and because I’d done a decent amount of research). I’m going in right now and fixing broken internal links — but that fantastic late-90s design is staying the same. Again, for posterity, despite the fact that the damn background with that tiny font makes my eyes bleed.
Another surprise was that my review of Fujiyama / Domo on Urbanspoon is generating a decent amount of traffic for me, too. When I look up this stat on Google Analytics and drill through for more detailed info, it seems that people usually only stay on my site for about a minute after clicking through to read my full review, unfortunately.
Sometimes I consider looking into some sort of banner ads for the pages that get the most traffic. But then I realize that a single page getting 100 hits a month is peanuts.
I think I’ll stick with blogging for the sake of blogging. Monetizing this motherfucker would be too much work.