It has been a while since I have posted anything about the site performance or plans for the site, so this is overdue. Once I upgraded the server last year I did not have to worry so much about traffic patterns and so forth. I now have plenty of bandwidth and horsepower to avoid having the site tip over. The nice thing about the current age is you can always get more disk, memory and bandwidth. In the coming crash, I expect the prices for server space to collapse with everything else.
For reasons I have never understand, March is the busiest month of the year in terms of traffic and number of comments. This March saw over 220,000 unique visitors to the site, after netting out robots, crawlers and so on. I credit some of the increase to longevity, as I’ve been at this for seven years. Some of it due to fewer people writing in this format. We are up to our eyeballs in YouTube performers, but very few people write short essays anymore. It is an under-served audience.
As far as the podcast, I have no way of knowing how many people listen every week, as the metrics are pretty much useless. YouTube provides stats, but I’ve seen my listen counts go backward, so something is wrong there. Maybe when they ban people they ban their history. Spreaker’s numbers are an estimate, but I don’t think many people use their app or site. iTunes is probably the top platform for consuming audio, but they don’t provide data to you unless you pay them for it.
The only thing I can go on is the number of people who tell me they recognize my voice or e-mail about the show. Having an unusual sound, something I never knew until I started this, means people will just walk up to me and ask me if I’m the man behind the podcast. It’s happened in Europe and here, so I guess that means a lot of people on this side of the divide listen at least a little. I get a lot of e-mail about old shows, so people must be going back through the catalog too.
On the media front, some people have suggested I give D-Live a try. I’m not a fan of consuming video, so I have no interest in doing video, but our folks are doing what amounts to radio talk shows on the D-Live platform. I’ve listened to White Art Collective on there from time to time. Fuentes is now their biggest act, so it would say the tolerance levels are much higher on D-Live than other platforms. I’m thinking a Saturday night or Friday night show would be fun, but I’m open to suggestions.
Similarly, request lines are open on the podcast, as far as topics. I like to do a commentary about the news once a month and a world report once a quarter or so, but otherwise I just do what comes to mind the Sunday before the show. I’m getting requests to read and review books from small publishers lately, so I thought doing a show on a book or books might be fun. I did a show on Shapiro’s book a while back and that got a good response, but that may just be because I trashed him.
As far as the site, on the drawing board for over a year has been a plan to modernize it a bit, but time is my enemy. Some suggested a message board for donors, which is a possibility. Someone else suggested a badge for donors in the comment section, which seems like a good idea. I’ll need to do some coding for that, which is why it has not happened yet. Again, time is my enemy. I like the plain style I use, so I will not be doing any big changes on that front. Plain site. Plain language.
The travel schedule has been squashed for this year, I think. All events I was expected to attend have been postponed indefinitely. This summer I hope to escape Lagos, but this lock down could delay that depending on what happens with economy. There’s rumblings that the mortgage market is in trouble, so house buying could be a totally different thing in a few months. Even so, if I do escape, travel will be out of the question for a while, so I probably will not be on the road for the rest of the year.
The floor is now open…
For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!
i like text presentation of information over video. in fact, i almost never watch video podcasts. one reason is that text is less ambiguous than video, another is that it is easier to go back and re-view/re-read a section with text. and the final reason is that i can hide what i am doing at work with text, easier than with video 🙂
one thing i think you could be good at, is finding historical parallels to current world conditions. not just surface similarities, but deeper societal features.