You know, I’ve written a few times about my struggle as to whether to continue blogging or not. Now, please don’t misinterpret what I’m saying as me not having faith in what I’m doing. Believe me, I spent a lot of time building my blog from scratch, and I’m proud of my end result. So, it’s not about insecurity or anything like that. But, the reality is, social media has changed a lot in the last 10-15 years. Bloggers like myself rely on social media; and when the algorithms are rigged in such away that it’s almost impossible to promote yourself without spending a tone of money on ads, that is a discouragement. In other words, it clear that there is a lot of suppression in social media; it’s not just about politics. I remember when podcasting was about the people; the “nobodies” made podcasting what it is now. Today, we almost can’t find any of the original podcasters from back in the day, because the news media has taken it over, and the people no longer have a voice.
Took a hard look at some stats, and I discovered quite a few things that changed my view about my own blogging
My revelation made for some good cyber-life experience!
So, I started to take a much closer look at the tools I have available to me, in terms of SEO, and I was surprised to discover a few things I hadn’t realized. Well, let me first share a few myths. I don’t remember if I’ve written about this before, but, with the exception of YouTube, there appears to be a clear anti-streaming services on some social media sites like Facebook. They hate Spotify, and they hate iTunes. The only thing FB wants to see on FB is YouTube. On some level, I see that on Twitter too. But, many are just artist promoting numbers to get people to listen to their music. Which is different from music fans sharing music they like. This was one of the reasons that caused me to stop blogging for a while. There is no real discussion about this on the net, and I didn’t know how to proceed. Until I found some recent legitimate numbers of streaming uses. Spotify has more than 450+ million users (including paid and freemium users). This really shocked me, because the attitudes on FB almost made me a shamed of starting a Spotify site. I mean, they would literally delete my posts. That is really a turn off. A lot of these music groups owners are assholes really. I was also shocked to find out that Spotify beat iTunes; Spotify has almost 4x more subscribers than iTunes, what I used to call the king of music content. This really reshaped my view of things.
The next thing I’ve learned is that, I was reading a lot of articles on how people are using their mobile phones to do more and more things such as shopping. So, since that made logical sense to me, I designed my blog for mobile use (really). Then after taking a closer look at my stats, it turns out that more than 70% of people who are using Windows computer systems are accessing my site via Firefox & Chrome. Another interesting fact that those who ARE using their mobiles to access my blog are mostly Apple iPhone users. While it’s true (relatively speaking), I have a small fan base of over a thousand+ monthly, they’re not only returning visits, I also discovered that people from all over the world. It’s frustrating when you’re doing something unique and you don’t have enough data/or articles written to help you with decisions about our web projects. I feel happy tho, because I can clearly see that my hard work is being appreciated.