My traffic history: started in August 2004, up to 15,000 pageviews/10,000 visits/day at the 2013 peak, when blogs were at their zenith.
I'd get 10 or 20 comments/post, often.
Then a slow decline until January 2015 when I became clinically depressed and barely functional such that it took everything I had to post one sentence/day just to show proof of life.
I recovered completely in October 2016 and resumed multiple posts daily as is the case today.
Traffic when I started back in in late 2016 on a regular multiple posts/day basis was around 100 pageviews/day.
Current traffic is about 600 pageviews/day, with 5-10 comments/week.
Still, a couple times a year some popular blog/website picks up something I've posted and links to my post which results in a sudden spike to 3,000-8,000 pageviews that day, with a regression to the norm over the next week or two.
One thing I find interesting is that things I post today I would've posted back in 2004, and vice versa.
It's amusing to discover a couple times/year that something I'm about to feature or just featured appeared 10-15 years ago.
Occasionally a reader from back in the day will point this out, to my delight.
As best I can tell, the only popular one-person blogs that still update regularly and go back as far as I do are https://www.swiss-miss.com/ [March 2005] and https://kottke.org/ [1998].
I take pride in publishing daily including weekends and holidays, unlike pretty much every other blog/website.
Always something new at boj if you can just make it through the night till the next morning....
As to making money from the site: when I started I thought perhaps I could do that, so the guy who set up my blog (I have 0 technical skills or knowledge of coding etc.) made it so I had Google AdSense on my homepage along with an Amazon Associate banner/link.
At the blog's peak I was generating about $300/month from each of those two sources, with a couple anomalous checks from Amazon in late 2014 for $2,000-$3,000.
Just when that happened is when I got depressed, and income collapsed to the point that I removed all ads from my homepage and left AdSense up on individual posts.
Currently Google deposits around $120 into my bank account every 6-12 months, though I may have failed to update my AdSense agreement such that my Google payments are kaput.
I'd get 10 or 20 comments/post, often.
Then a slow decline until January 2015 when I became clinically depressed and barely functional such that it took everything I had to post one sentence/day just to show proof of life.
I recovered completely in October 2016 and resumed multiple posts daily as is the case today.
Traffic when I started back in in late 2016 on a regular multiple posts/day basis was around 100 pageviews/day.
Current traffic is about 600 pageviews/day, with 5-10 comments/week.
Still, a couple times a year some popular blog/website picks up something I've posted and links to my post which results in a sudden spike to 3,000-8,000 pageviews that day, with a regression to the norm over the next week or two.
One thing I find interesting is that things I post today I would've posted back in 2004, and vice versa.
It's amusing to discover a couple times/year that something I'm about to feature or just featured appeared 10-15 years ago.
Occasionally a reader from back in the day will point this out, to my delight.
As best I can tell, the only popular one-person blogs that still update regularly and go back as far as I do are https://www.swiss-miss.com/ [March 2005] and https://kottke.org/ [1998].
I take pride in publishing daily including weekends and holidays, unlike pretty much every other blog/website.
Always something new at boj if you can just make it through the night till the next morning....
As to making money from the site: when I started I thought perhaps I could do that, so the guy who set up my blog (I have 0 technical skills or knowledge of coding etc.) made it so I had Google AdSense on my homepage along with an Amazon Associate banner/link.
At the blog's peak I was generating about $300/month from each of those two sources, with a couple anomalous checks from Amazon in late 2014 for $2,000-$3,000.
Just when that happened is when I got depressed, and income collapsed to the point that I removed all ads from my homepage and left AdSense up on individual posts.
Currently Google deposits around $120 into my bank account every 6-12 months, though I may have failed to update my AdSense agreement such that my Google payments are kaput.