For me it's a mixed bag, some of the stuff I write that I think will be for a very small set of people does surprisingly well, other stuff that I think is more important does much worse.

But just like making music, I write what I write because it helps me to put down my thoughts, how many others read it, find it useful and/or comment on it is really not that big a deal to me, though I'm always very happy when there is some kind of interaction around something I write. Usually I learn as much from the feedback and the comments as I did from doing whatever it was that I wrote about in the first place.