Looking back at hits and misses as we enter blog toddlerhood
September 3rd was the first anniversary of this joint, so I thought I’d do a quick year-in-review. There will be a small amount of navel-gazing, but not too much. I write this blog for fun, and I presume you read it for the same reason.
The Stats!
Thanks to all 4651 of you who subscribe as of this writing! I am obviously not a threat to the Substack leaderboard, but I appreciate every subscriber and I still get a little thrill every time someone signs up. (I also want to walk into the ocean every time someone unsubscribes, which is just typical being-a-writer.)
Some of you subscribe to 200 newsletters or more. This is not an exaggeration – I get the stats for each new subscriber. I am inbox-zero person and that would make me insane. I assume most of those are symbolic subscriptions, a sort of extra-vigorous “👍”, but I still appreciate it!
Subscriber growth tends come in clumps when I drop a particularly successful post, or when Bill Bishop, my #1 cheerleader here and an old friend from our mutual days in China, gives me a boost. (Subscribe to Bill’s excellent Sinocism newsletter if you are at all interested in China or geopolitics!)
Page views have trended steadily up, which is nice. The open rate is about 45%. I am inconsistent about promoting my posts on social media, but the best referring platform by far is (brace yourself) LinkedIn, followed by Bluesky, which is a recent artifact driven by some big-V reposts, and Facebook because I’m old. Everything else is rounding errors. I don’t post on Twitter anymore and only rarely on Threads. The one time I got good traffic from Threads is because I got into an argument with someone over my “Return to Commuterstan” post. The algorithm loves conflict.
I’ve aimed for a post roughly every two weeks and I managed 29 over the first year, which was more or less on target what with an all-consuming job, kid, etc.
Imagethief 