Freshly Pressed #blogwanking

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking

Today was an insanely irritating day, and I’ve got a blog post nibbling at the back of my brain that I really don’t want to write on account of there will be a high chance of insanely irritating fallout, and I don’t want to babysit the internet today.  I’m listening to the new Sleater-Kinney album and so far I don’t like it.  So given all that and my general mood of ARRGH LUTHER SMASH, have a blogwanking post.

You may recall that my post “In which the kids are fine, shut up” went Freshly Pressed a week ago Thursday.  I’d been notified by email on… the previous Sunday? Saturday? that it was going to happen, but they hadn’t told me which day.  So lots of reloading on the FP page ensued.

Notable fact: 164 page views during the first hour it was on FP, which was the biggest single spike of the time period.

GRAPH!:

Screen Shot 2015-01-20 at 4.16.40 PM

That big spike in the middle there is actually the second day the post was on FP.  Conveniently for me, the week prior to going FP was pretty damn consistent, with an average of 392 page views and 233 unique visitors per day.  The FP went live at about 4:00 PM on Thursday.

Over the next four days I had 2873 page views and 1662 unique visitors.  The peak day was Friday, with 1085 page views and 610 unique visitors.  Subtracting out the average of the previous seven days, I find that Freshly Pressed brought me a total of 1305 page views and 964 unique visitors over those four days.  Is this perfect?  Not at all, since I have generally been posting less over the last couple of weeks because I’ve been busy with the book– so my natural views would likely have dropped, meaning that FP brought me more than those numbers indicate.  In fact, I’m comfortable calling 1305 and 964 the minimum in terms of how much traffic I got.  Also important: the page is still getting hits; it’s dueling with the Snowpiercer post from day to day on what the highest-traffic post of the day is.  It hasn’t been beaten by anything but the Snowpiercer post yet.  Maybe once.  Not more than that.

(Why four days?  I view FP in grid view, which shows nine posts.  After four days, my post got pushed off the page in that view.  I figure that’s as good as any other demarcation point.  Notice also the drop on day five below.)

GRAPH!:

Screen Shot 2015-01-20 at 4.16.25 PM

As you can see, it’s still getting noticeable attention from day to day, so clearly there are people who like to scroll way back on that FP page to see what’s on there.

Other notable facts:

The post had 40 WP likes when the FP hit.  It now has 810.  It has been Liked on Facebook   42 times, been retweeted 41 times, and reblogged 42 times.  There are currently 155 comments.

Since it went Freshly Pressed, I’ve gone from 4550 followers to 5276.  It remains to be seen if I see a sustained traffic bump from all those new people once my posting gets back to normal and I stop blathering about the book all.the.damn.time.  (I promise!  I’ll be interesting again someday!)

I know you all needed that information quite badly.  You may resume your normal lives now, if you can.

Discover more from Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

23 thoughts on “Freshly Pressed #blogwanking”

  3. So, even more wanking here. This is the biggest bump that I personally have seen from FP. I don’t know what it means. I suspect your post is just that good. Here is where curating links comes in handy. Likes from three other friends who have been Freshly Pressed.

    Diana and Gretchen were FP’d three days apart a year ago this week. Diana’s post is at 175 likes, Gretchen’s is at 268. No idea how many of those are directly from FP, because we share those links a bit. Sabina was Freshly Pressed in September. Her post is at 177 likes.

    All those are clearly written from a feminist perspective. You can tell just from the headlines, and Diana’s also talks about ageism and racism. So that may have limited the audience. They are also all written in a more straightforwardly-serious tone than yours. Not that yours isn’t serious — it’s just serious wrapped in entertaining, is all. And probably the fact that the photo you are discussing had been all over the internet helped you too.

    Diana’s spike was really just a 48 hour spike. We could call it three days. Her best day was also the second, IIRC.

    And the length of time between when you were notified and when the post hit surpised Diana and me and made us wonder if the process has changed in the last year. We’ve never known it to take that long. You got lots of views from me coming to look for the bump in likes and comments, or the FP badge, so I could reblog and share it.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Of the posts that hit FP right around when mine did, three have more Likes– one by several hundred– and one only has a couple hundred. There was one that had been FP for several days and was only at 99.

      I was curious about the delay, too. I messaged you right after getting the email and it took five or six days before it popped. A post before mine was about the Charlie Hebdo massacre, which at the time was less than 24 hours old, so clearly the editors aren’t all required to put their posts in a queue. Then again, being delayed meant my four days were Thursday-Friday-Saturday-Sunday, which is probably a best-case scenario.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    2. This is all terribly fascinating. I wonder if my numbers (and other older numbers) are also affected by the changes in how they curate FP posts? Posts used immediately after notification (mine did, and I know some others have too) and were curated daily. That seems to have slowed down.

      And I think a LOT of it has to do with tone. I wrote a rather serious, rather short piece. I didn’t even mean for that many people to see it–I was till a really new, really really small blogger. Originally, it didn’t even have an image in the post.

      The things you learn…lol

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. Yes. Very interesting. I am wondering now if I need to figure out the freshly pressed schedule and make a point of being one of the first ten commenters on FP posts when they post new stuff. I commented on Luther’s post because I had stuff to say, but also because I wanted the people who found it through FP to see a busy blog. I was getting sporadic comment likes off-and on for that whole four-day period. And that never happens.

        Should I tweet this link to Gretchen and Sabina just to let them know they have been referred to?

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

    3. Side note, since you mentioned the delay in being notified and being actually FPed–mine was about a week too. For current events, I imagine they move it up in the queue, but feminist issues usually aren’t time-sensitive.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  4. Mine was delayed by about a week also. I actually thought they’d changed their mind and weren’t going to feature it. My hits came pretty consistently for about 10 days. (Of course much more the first few days). By the way Luther, I can’t remember if Icommented when I first read your piece (if I read frommy phone I generally don’t comment) but I thought it was pretty stellar. I would imagine that in addition to it being well written and well argued and entertaining, I think the topic is onethat appeals to such a varied group of people.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    2. That is interesting, because it was right about the time Diana’s was featured. So, that part of the process has not actually changed, and we can conclude that Diana’s post probably hit when it did because she posted it on MLK Day.

      It also means yours was selected for FP before hers, if I have the timeline correct. I’ll have to go back to the blogs and look at the dates you actually published, but I’m thinking yours hit three days after Diana’s. I said so in my first Feminist Friday post, but I could have made an error based on when I actually discovered your post.

      Like

      Reply

    2. I don’t, either. That is why you see so many likes, Facebook shares with one-sentence comments, and retweets from me during the day. Those are me maintaining my presence while walking to work and on my 15-minute breaks.

      Like

      Reply

HERE IS WHERE YOU TALK: