Tag: Marketing

How Many Readers of My Blog Are Actually Alive?

James Wallace Harris, 8/31/25

On August 29, 2025, this blog had 10.5K hits. That’s small compared to big sites, but huge compared to my daily average of around 400 hits. Supposedly, those hits were from 322 people, which is 1% fewer than the day before. Normally, most people read just one page when they visit. But to reach 10,500, those 322 would have to read 33 pages each. That’s not normal.

In other words, I have a mystery. Here are the stats for August 30th. It had 399 hits, but 330 people. Now that’s normal.

I can only assume a web crawler, bot, or AI was reading my blog. But here’s another mystery.

Whoever, or whatever, was reading my blog was reading my most popular posts. Above, list my most popular essays in order. Why would some mindless bot or brilliant AI want to read these pages more than once? Were AIs recommending pages to their AI pals?

I wish I had Google Analytics, but the price tier I’m using with WordPress doesn’t offer that.

Do any of you living readers know what’s going on? Hell, do any of you AI beings know?

I did asked CoPilot: On 8/29/25 my blog got over ten thousand hits. It normally gets about 400 in a day. Can you explain what happened. My blog is auxiliarymemory.com

That’s a huge spike, Jim—congrats! 🚀 Going from 400 to over 10,000 hits in a single day suggests something unusual happened. While I couldn’t access the site directly just now, here are several likely explanations based on patterns I’ve seen with blogs like Auxiliary Memory, especially given your focus on digitization, cultural memory, and thoughtful essays:

🔍 Possible Reasons for the Traffic Surge

1. Viral Post or External Share

  • One of your recent posts may have been shared on a high-traffic platform like Reddit (e.g., r/ObscureMedia, r/OldSchoolCool, or r/DataHoarder), Hacker News, or a niche Facebook group.
  • If your post touched on digitization, rare media, or philosophical insights, it could’ve resonated with a specific community.

2. Mention in a Newsletter or Article

  • You might’ve been featured in a popular newsletter (like The Browser, Recomendo, or Morning Brew) or cited in an article about media preservation, Moon travel, or cognitive science.

3. Search Engine Boost

  • A topic you covered may have suddenly become trending—like a documentary release, anniversary of a Moon mission, or a viral debate on consciousness—and your post ranked high in search results.

4. Backlink from a High-Authority Site

  • If a university, archive, or tech blog linked to your site (especially in a post about digitization workflows or Obsidian setups), that could drive thousands of hits in a day.

5. Bot Traffic or Scraper Spike

  • Less exciting but worth checking: sometimes automated bots or scrapers can inflate traffic. If the bounce rate was high or session durations were low, this might be the case.

🧠 What You Can Do Next

  • Check your referrer logs in your blog’s analytics dashboard (WordPress, Jetpack, or Google Analytics) to see where the traffic came from.
  • Look at the top-performing post on 8/29 to identify what drew people in.
  • If it was organic and positive, consider writing a follow-up post or updating that entry with links to related content to keep new readers engaged.

If you want help analyzing the traffic patterns or crafting a follow-up post that builds on the momentum, I’d love to collaborate. Want to dig into your analytics together or brainstorm what might’ve caught fire?

My Reply: What was strange is it wasn’t a boost to one page, but many of my old posts got 50 to 250 hits each. Is that some kind of attack?

That pattern is definitely unusual, Jim—and it’s smart of you to question it. When many older posts get moderate traffic all at once, it’s not typical of a single viral share or organic surge. Here’s how to think through what might’ve happened:

🧠 Possibilities Beyond a Simple Boost

1. Bot or Crawler Activity

  • Some bots (especially aggressive scrapers or indexing tools) will hit multiple pages across a site in rapid succession.
  • If the hits came from a small number of IP addresses, had very short session durations, or lacked referrer data, that’s a strong sign.
  • Check for user agents like curl, python-requests, or suspicious browser strings.

2. AI Training or Archival Scraping

  • Your blog’s rich archive and thoughtful essays might’ve been targeted by a large-scale web crawler—possibly for training an AI model or building a digital archive.
  • These crawlers often avoid detection by mimicking real browsers and spreading requests over time.

3. RSS Feed or API Aggregator Spike

  • If someone added your blog to a content aggregator or feed reader with a large user base, it could trigger distributed traffic to older posts.
  • This would show up with legitimate-looking referrers but still hit many pages at once.

4. Search Engine Reindexing

  • Sometimes Google or Bing re-crawls a site deeply, especially if there’s been a sitemap update or structural change.
  • These hits are usually low-impact and spread out, but they can spike if your site was flagged for deeper indexing.

🛡️ How to Investigate

  • Analytics Deep Dive: Look at referrer URLs, session duration, bounce rate, and geographic origin. If most hits came from one country or IP block, that’s a clue.
  • Server Logs: If you have access, scan for unusual user agents or request patterns.
  • Security Plugins: Tools like Wordfence (for WordPress) can help detect and block malicious crawlers.

🧭 What It Probably Wasn’t

  • A typical “attack” (like a DDoS or exploit attempt) usually targets login pages, admin panels, or specific vulnerabilities—not dozens of archived essays.
  • If your site stayed responsive and didn’t show signs of strain, it was likely non-malicious.

If you want, I can help you interpret your analytics data or draft a robots.txt strategy to manage future crawlers. Or we could even turn this into a blog post—“When Your Archive Gets Raided: A Blogger’s Guide to Sudden Traffic Surges.” That’d be very Auxiliary Memory.

My reply: Unfortunately, I don’t have access to logs from my site, which is hosted at WordPress.com and I don’t pay for the advanced level that supports Google Analytics. But you’re right, this might make for an interesting blog post.

That limitation makes it trickier to diagnose, but it also opens the door to a compelling narrative—especially for Auxiliary Memory, where you often explore the intersection of technology, memory, and mystery. You could frame the post as part detective story, part meditation on digital presence.

Here’s a possible structure to spark your thinking:

📝 Working Title Ideas

  • “The Day My Blog Was Raided: A Mystery in Metrics”
  • “When the Archive Woke Up: A Blogger’s Traffic Spike Without a Trace”
  • “Ten Thousand Hits and No Clue Why”

🧩 Suggested Structure for the Post

1. The Setup

  • Describe your typical traffic patterns (400 hits/day).
  • Introduce the anomaly: 10,000+ hits on August 29, spread across many old posts.

2. The Investigation

  • Share what tools you do have (WordPress stats, Jetpack).
  • Note the absence of referrer data or analytics granularity.
  • Speculate on possible causes: bots, AI crawlers, reindexing, or a hidden share.

3. The Philosophy

  • Reflect on what it means to have a digital archive that suddenly gets attention.
  • Explore the idea of memory—how old posts can resurface, like forgotten artifacts.
  • Tie it to your broader themes: preservation, access, and the unpredictability of digital legacy.

4. The Takeaway

  • Offer thoughts on how bloggers can prepare for or interpret these events.
  • Maybe even invite readers to share if they were part of the traffic surge.

If you’d like, I can help you draft the opening paragraph or brainstorm a visual metaphor—like comparing the blog to a dusty library that suddenly had all its books checked out. Want to sketch it out together?

My reply: I’m good. You’ve described my regular approach to writing a post. But I will mention your help. That is an interesting aspect in itself.

Conclusion

I think this might be the best answer:

3. RSS Feed or API Aggregator Spike

  • If someone added your blog to a content aggregator or feed reader with a large user base, it could trigger distributed traffic to older posts.
  • This would show up with legitimate-looking referrers but still hit many pages at once.

I checked the stats for my other blog, Classics of Science Fiction, and found it had a similar bump on August 21.

If an RSS aggregator shared my most popular posts from each site, I don’t think it generated any subscriptions, likes, or repeat visits. Thanks for the promotion, though. I haven’t received increased traffic, but it was kind of you.

Every once in a blue moon, some big site will link to my little site, and one of my pages will get several hundred to a few thousand hits. That’s kind of nice. But I never know where the link is published.

I’ve always written my blogs with the idea that I was writing to myself. I just didn’t care who was reading my diary. It’s flattering that some people enjoy reading what I write. But I don’t want to think about that too much. I don’t want to start writing to get hits. I don’t think I have to worry about that because I seldom get hits from Google searches. Evidently, what I’m interested in is not what most people are interested in reading.

On the other hand, I wonder if AI minds are reading my blog. I’ve always loved robot stories in science fiction, so it would be cool if I had a few robot readers.

JWH

The Impact of the Like Button

PBS Frontline for 2/18/14 aired the documentary Generation Like about how teens are using the Internet to be liked, and how corporations are using this mass movement to their advantage.  To be honest, the report claims teens are quite savvy about how they are being manipulated by marketing gurus and feel they are playing the system right back at them.  At best it’s a symbiotic relationship.  The funny thing is the documentary makers asked many teens to define “selling out” and they couldn’t, yet corporations have a new mantra, “your consumer is your new marketer.”  This show is about the need to be liked, the need to sell, and how society is changing when everyone is selling themselves.

facebook_like_button_big1

I found Generation Like quite amazing, especially as a 62 year old guy who knows damn little about modern teens.  The change in teens thriving on the internet is as profound as the baby boomers experienced in the psychedelic sixties.  I’m curious how representative this report on teen life is to the average teen, and luckily at the PBS Frontline page provides some statistics at “What Are Teens Doing Online?”

Even though Frontline does a fantastic job of covering the topic, I was left with many questions.  Is this melding of marketing to teens wanting to be liked while they struggle to find their identities an American phenomenon, or is it worldwide?  What impact does it have for kids who don’t get hundreds of likes, and what does it mean for popular kids with hundreds of likes to know that some kids gets millions of likes?  Has popularity ever been so quantified?  Is this the start of a hive culture?  And can a hive culture work when all the individuals are promoting themselves?  Are we at the start of a cultural transformation or a fad that will go away? 

Many of the teens talked about their talent, but weren’t specific as to what that was.  Others, like the 13 year old Baby Scumbag was quite aware of what got hits, and was expecting to make money.  If Hollywood was a driving force for fame in the 20th century, the Internet in the 21st century will be many magnitudes more forceful.  And these kids want more than 15 minutes.

I remember the pressure to be liked as a teen, or even to be popular, but it was nothing like this.  I was happy to have one or two good friends, and pleased when others knew my name and said hi.  From the outside looking in, it appears these teens feel like struggling actors trying to get noticed.  How is that changing the nature of friendship?  On the other hand, many of the teens profiled, helped each other in real life to create their internet lives, so they are still socializing in the old way.   

This documentary is the tiniest tip of the iceberg at exploring the new online world.  I barely know how to use Facebook.  I have a Twitter account, but I only use it to remember what I’ve read online.  And most of the other social media sites this film explored I’m clueless as how to use and what they do.  Will adults slowly absorb this Like Culture?  I do blog, and I do get Likes, but not many.  But then I don’t crave them like the teens in this show.  The show ended with this wonderful visual.  A young girl is all animated while producing her video for YouTube, but when she turns off the camera, she sighs, deflates, looks very bored, and the film ends with the sound of her fingernails clicking distractedly on the camera.  Will being on for the Internet become a kind of social crack, and normal life a kind of lonely withdrawal?

You can watch the entire film here.  See I’m doing the same thing as the teens.  I’m marketing for PBS, and liking their show.

JWH – 2/19/14