Name In The Title? Numbers Go Up. (Not A Post About Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, Although There Are Some Screenshots.)

A while back, I mentioned that it looked as though Google and/or Blogger had changed something about the way they record page views. That's remained consistent ever since (Okay, it's only been a few weeks...) and it's given me a much better idea of which posts get noticed and why.

Surprise, surprise - it has a lot to do with two things: the topic of the post and whether you can tell from the title what it's about. Who'd have believed it, eh?

Over the many years I've been doing this, I've gone through a number of phases regarding how I come up with titles. Back at the very beginning I used short, often familiar, phrases I thought were a clever or witty match for the content, like "I Can See Your House From Here" for a post about flying mounts or "Again! Again!" for one about repetition in MMORPGs.

I kept that up for a good while but very quickly I also started adding the name of the game I was talking about, as in "Home Is Where The Art Is: EQ2" (Also, note how I used to call the game "EQ2" not "EQII", as I do now. The Label is still EQ2 because of that.) I carried on doing it that way for many years but as time went on I diversified. There were more and more posts with no named game in the title and it became increasingly hard to know what the topic was until you started reading (And often not even then...)

I'd always used pop culture references in my titles, particularly song titles or snatches of lyrics, but by the late twenty-teens that trend had pretty much taken over. Probably as a result of having a lot of time off work, what with my chemo and then the pandemic, meaning I had a lot of time to fill, I started using song lyrics almost exclusively and the more obscure the better. I used to spend almost as long scouring lyric.com for suitable phrases as I did writing the posts.

When that phase was at its height it was often next to impossible to figure out from the title alone what a post was going to be about. When I look back through the blog for something I know I posted about during that period, I have to use the Search function to find it because I no longer have any idea what most of the titles are supposed to mean. For example, a post called "A Dead Squirrel That I Hit" turns out to be about Divinity: Original Sin 2 and another going by the name of "I'm In A Film Of Personal Soundtrack" gives my thoughts on music in video games.

Throughout this phase I still sometimes appended the name of a game to the title but if I found a quote or lyric fragment I really liked I'd generally let it stand on its own for aesthetic reasons. It was fun for quite a while (For me, that is. Possibly not so much for anyone trying to figure out what the hell I was writing on any given day.) but eventually finding suitable lyrics turned into a bit of a chore so I stopped.

That was followed by a short period when I tried to make the titles as declarative as possible, sometimes to a parodic extent, as in, for example... well, it didn't last long, I can't remember anything specific and I haven't been able to find anything by random browsing but it was a thing for a bit, just take my word for it.

After that, in the most recent phase before the present-day, I've tended just to use whatever seemed like a good idea at the time. A bit of all the above and a lot of whatever took my fancy on the day. 

And none of it seemed to matter all that much because I couldn't really tell who was reading what or even how many readers there were. 

I did once think I knew. Long, long ago I used to follow the stats religiously and they were pretty consistent. We're talking a decade or so back there. I used to be able to track a steadily-rising graph that seemed to indicate a growing readership and it kind of made sense.

After a few years, though, all the lines started to head for the stars. I know i posted about it once or twice, when the phenomenon was new and briefly exciting - tens of thousands of views per post! It became apparent soon enough that almost none of those views was real, though, and it was far too much trouble to try and dig any convincing numbers out of the slurry of false positives, so I just gave up looking at the stats at all.

For quite a few years I looked Blogger's own stats maybe two or three times a year at most. I stopped using Google Analytics years before they shut it down and I didn't sign up to the replacement. About the only time I really checked the numbers was after Blaugust, just to see if it made any impact. It didn't seem to.

And then came the recent shift in how the data is gathered, still unexplained but now very much the New Way of doing things. And it's much better.

It's also much worse in that I'm seeing hugely reduced visitor numbers but it seems far more likely they represent some close approximation of reality, not least because the statistics now correlate convincingly with the topics of the posts and especially with the titles. 

As soon as I saw what was happening, I re-instated my former policy of including the names of games in the header, whenever appropriate. When not writing about games, I've tried to make the titles at least marginally relevant to the content. 

I'm not a zealot about it. If a post is itself somewhat fuzzy or unfocused then I'm happy to have the title reflect that. I also still go with something that amuses me or that I think looks smart, on the occasions anything like that comes to mind.

And it seems to have some effect. Regular posts with no named game in the title all end up with roughly the same viewership numbers after a week or two, suggesting a fairly consistent readership. Interestingly, it runs at around a third of my subscriber numbers as reported by Feedly, which could either mean two-thirds of my supposed followers have forgotten I exist or that all of them can only stomach about a third of what I'm offering them. 

Or anything in-between, I guess. I imagine it's a bit of a mixture. I'm just happy anyone comes back at all.

Certainly most people leave no trace. I get plenty of comments, for which I'm perpetually and eternally grateful because comments are the life-blood of a blog, but I don't get that many commenters. It's mostly the same names, many of whom are bloggers themselves, on whose blogs I also leave comments. It's all very cosy and a big part of why I keep doing this but it doesn't tell me a great deal about who else is reading this stuff.

One thing that's very noticeable, now I can see the trends so clearly, is that increased page views do not lead to more comments. Since the new accounting took over, it's very plain that posts about specific games get about twice the page views and posts about hot new titles that have just launched or otherwise entered the news cycle get anything up to four times the base figure. 

And yet all of them still have the same kind of comment numbers. Only once in a very rare while do I get a comment from someone I've not heard from before or even an anonymous comment. More people are finding the clearly-labeled posts about topical content, sure, but whether they're finding anything they like when they get there is as mysterious as ever.

The question I've been asking myself is, now I have this semi-reliable method of assessing the success of what I'm posting, what, if anything, am I going to do with it? The answer is almost certainly going to be "Not much."

In the last month, my most-viewed posts, by a good margin, have been those on Blue Protocol: Star Resonance. As it happens, I'm still playing that game and I do have more to say about it so there will be some more of that. It will be instructive to see if those gain the same traction or if  BP:SR's shine has already faded. At least I have some kind of benchmark to judge against now.

I won't, obviously, be writing about games (Or anything else.) that I'm not interested in just because it gets attention but I will be making sure to mention the names of games I do write about in the titles. In general, I plan on maintaining a level of clarity in the titles that would have been anathema to me a few years ago, when I was actively attempting to make them as incomprehensible as possible.

Of course, I may just get bored of that and move into some as-yet unthought of new phase. Stats are all very well but you can't let them get in the way of self-indulgence creativity.

If anyone was hoping this post was going somewhere, I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you. This is about as far as it's going to go. I got so bored writing it a few paragraphs back I was going to give up on it altogether but then I realized that would mean I'd have to start over on something else, either that or miss a posting day, so carrying on seemed like the easier option, but I can't say I'm thrilled about it. Congratulations to anyone that's made it this far! 

Before I finish, does anyone remember that thing Darkpaw were doing with the new Creator Program for EQII? I wrote something about it. I wasn't very complimentary. 

Well, it's happened. They flagged it up on the Launcher recently. I'm not sure when but I only noticed it last night. The forum post about it went up on Saturday. Eleven Creators have been inducted in the first tranche, including Fading, who runs The EverQuest Show, and our very own Stargrace.(Who seems to be operating from a new blog I didn't have in my Feedly or Blogroll. I do now!) None of the others have I heard of before. 

Good luck to all of them. The only thing I have to contribute is that, now I can see some stats I believe to be relatively reliable, I can confirm that clearly-labeled posts about EQII tend to get double the baseline views, so perhaps there is some kind of audience for the game outside the forums after all. 

I can't say I believed it until now.