Because I was curious to see whether anyone was actually reading my rants on this website, I installed an exciting statistics doohickey two weekends ago, and it’s amusing to note that even on a blog such as this one, the usual suspects kick the face off of all other articles (in terms of traffic, rather than literal face-kickage).

I’m happy to report that even on days where I don’t write anything, Revert to Saved still has traffic, and that the stats aren’t swaying me in the slightest regarding any new content I’m going to write. They do, however, show how tempting it must be for a publisher to follow the AOL way and just churn out shit to appeal to search engines.

For example, I spent a few hours a couple of days ago writing a long, considered review of GarageBand for iPad. Even online on a typical tech blog, it’s the sort of thing I’d expect to have gotten around £150 for. By contrast, I also that day fired off a bitchy little rant about an Adobe video that pretty much went WAH WAH WAH APPLE COCOA WAH CS5 JOBS HATES US WAH WAH WAH. The Adobe piece got ten times as many visits as the GarageBand review.

Similarly, keywords in titles make a big difference. A two-year old article Steve Jobs is going to die! still gets lots of hits, no doubt fuelled by people eager to know that the CEO is about to pass. (How disappointed they must be to find an article essentially telling everyone to leave him be, that Apple will be fine without his daily involvement, and ending with “Get well soon, Steve”.) This knowledge won’t change anything on the site either, because I admit to ensuring titles are likely to be picked up by search engines and roving eyes, but then that’s been something I’ve done since first writing for magazines a decade ago. You write interesting titles for articles, or the subs rewrite them for you and get all grumpy at the extra work.

The only exception to not making changes due to statistics has come from the interview with Rob Janoff, which is still bringing in a lot of traffic—if only I’d had stats running the day that went live!—which has made me wonder whether I should reprint some other interviews I’ve done over the past year or two. I’m not sure any would have quite the same impact as the Apple logo designer, but the interest seems to be there. Some of these are uncut interviews with people like Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov, which could be presented in a similar fashion to the Mike ‘Hellboy’ Mignola interview I posted a few years ago. Any feedback on this would be appreciated.