Schmivehundred!

When I opened Blogger the other morning I saw that the Hiccupps all-time page view counter had ticked up to exactly 500000.

My initial feeling was pleasure. Ooh! A milestone! Half a million views! Get me!

But that was fleeting.

As with many metrics, today's value is almost the least engaging aspect. What's more interesting is what the number represents, what it is desired that it should represent, and how closely those two concepts align on axes that matter.

Also interesting: who wanted this metric (and there may be multiple interested parties) and whether they still want it, what assumptions are being made about it, what values (or milestones) matter, what it is being plugged into, and what decisions are made using it.

That's not all, of course, because one sample is just one sample. More interesting is where it sits in context to others, if and how it is trending, and whether it correlates with relevant related metrics over the same period.

I could go on.

I don't know how Blogger calculates these page views. I know that I've experimented a handful of times over the years and found the counting to be unreliable and inconsistent with the Google Analytics data that is also provided.

I've also seen posts get published and immediately have tens of page views which seems at best unlikely. So I'll continue treat this number with the same caution that I do lots of the metrics I encounter.

But that doesn't mean I can't take anything from it. For example, I think it's a reasonable assumption that something related to views is being counted because I see a rough correlation between an individual post's page views and its level of engagement on social media.

I think I can say that people are reading my posts still, and that, since Twitter went off the rails, they are probably doing it less than they did before. Which is interesting, but not enough that I'm going to try to do anything different over here.

So, 500k? Yeah, it was definitely fun for a minute, and my immediate reaction shows the power of culturally significant values, but really in my logical mind I'm thinking more five hundred? schmivehundred!

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