Hits or Comments?

I am trying to write often so as to drive the blogsound off the page...

Speaking of, the occasion of my 30,000th hit has caused a question to form in my mind: Which is better, lots of hits or lots of comments?

I guess like all things it depends on the index. Certainly if you have a commercial site then it is all about hits. Even if it isn't a commercial site, having a large number of steady hits is nice - good for the self esteem. But does it really mean anything? Are these hit repeat readers that care about what they might see, or are they people that have stumbled onto your site as a mistaken part of a net search or simply by hitting the "next blog" button?

In my head, I like to think that the 55 hits per day I average at this site are mostly repeaters. I'm probably mistaken. The referral display on its own shows many more random hits every day. Mostly its people that follow the link to my page while searching. Often it seems like it is people searching for "Tom Lycus" or for "Wicked Weasel." I don't pay the surcharge on my counter to see what the most searched term is, but I would bet on "Wicked Weasel." That's cool, because I like promoting their product, it's why there's a link on the page. Interestingly, the other reference is a misspelling. It should be "Leykis." I wonder how many hits that correction will generate. Sometimes the referral is a search by the name of someone I have mentioned at one time or another on the page. I am officially starting a policy with regard to this. Each time I see a hit from a referral like that I am going to write to that person. Seems like a good way to keep in touch. The referral thing doesn't show the hits from the "next blog" button, the blogger domain is excluded. If I look through the stats on the counter I see those though. Something on the order of 10 per day.

So what, 55 average hits less 10-15 referrals, less 10 nextblog equals what, 30 other hits? Could we call them subscribers? Repeaters? People with a lot of time on their hands? Its not the New York Times, is it?

Still, a year ago I only averaged 30 hits per day, and the year before that 18; and those probably had proportional contributions from the other sources too. So, I'm up. That's nice.

This blog has never had real comment traffic. I don't know what to make of that. Perhaps I simply always present a complete argument. Perhaps the people reading think that commenting: "shut up you total moron" wouldn't be productive. Part of it is I think that Blogger isn't really as conducive to comments as some of the other net destinations. MySpace and LiveJournal are both more comment friendly. They encourage the development of response threads. Blogger mostly just dead ends. Here I get one or two comments every third or fourth post. Its nice to hear from people.

I have a friend who's blog I read gets something on the order of 15 comments per post. People comment almost every post, and sometimes they comment multiple times. It's amazing and I am jealous. I doubt that site has 30,000 hits, but somehow I think the bounty of comments says more than a counter in the margin.

Do you think people on TV or writers for papers and magazines are the same way? Does getting a letter from a viewer mean more to them than their Nielson rating? Or is this strictly a creature of the more personal blog world?

At what point does a blog become a mass media thing and not a personal correspondence thing? That would seem easy to answer. I would imagine it happens about the time you have to turn off your comments because you are getting too much from too many people. Certainly it isn't about hits, about bandwidth. It would seem that a person writing a blog would get irritated be tangential comments long before a host would get bothered by the total transfer.

Would that prove comments are the more desirable? At least until there are too many to manage, and then you switch over and measure success by hits?

Actually that would seem to be something worth thinking about as well. What defines success for a blog site, and does it have anything at all to do with hits or comments or is it more just about having a place to put one's thoughts? That would certainly divorce it from TV or other mass media. Very few TV shows are made just for the process of making the show. That has to be the case with the majority of blogs.

Around and around with no real conclusion I am afraid. To my 2 or 3 commenters every third post or so, thank you for commenting. And to my 55 per day average hit people, thanks for the regular attention. Whatever the measure, I'm enjoying the typing.