Like all human beings I have an irrational interest in round numbers and thus I note simply because I am a bit of a saddo that this, my personal blog, has now been read 1,9999,972 times since it was launched just under five years ago. Now you make not think that this is a terribly big number.
It is not really that big. In this blog's first months I was lucky if I attracted 50 page impressions a day. It was at a time of relationship and health chaos and when I had "parted ways" with the company I had founded 12 years previously as a bunch of loathsome asset strippers took control. Writing was therapy for me so it did not really matter of no-one was reading.
Over the next few months as i bought a one way ticket to Greece and walked around its hills and those of Albania, shedding weight, meeting the woman who is now my wife and sorting out what to do, the blog was great therapy. Having been barred from writing what I thought, by the asset strippers at the old place ,I wrote with complete freedom for the first time in years. It was a pleasure.
At the old place the asset strippers made it a sacking offence to talk to me or even retweet a tweet. So it was to his immense credit that the Pizza Hardman Darren Atwater risked a P45 to assist with that project. Of course the heavy traffic goes to my financial outlet www.ShareProphets.com - it will be four on April 13th and on 14,924,457 page impressions this morning it will be passing its own round number later this week and the combined total will this week pass through 17 million.
For what it is worth, Alexa ranks this blog in terms of readership as 182,720 in the UK and 1,235,339 in the world. ShareProphets is 20,463 and 254,956. Of course you can always "buy" readers by spending a fortune on SEO and on advertising and on buying in content. But running operations at a loss is not my game. I have always said that these sites only stay open if they cost me nothing and give me pleasure in writing. If folks read them as well, that is a bonus.