Inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
In the late 90s, I created three Google Blogger blogs: The Rat’s Eye View, Wirebender Audio Rants, and Geezer with a Grudge. The Rat’s Eye view was, originally, going to be a repository for a collection of articles I had written in my position as a freelance manufacturing/management consultant with Productivity, Inc. (A long dead manufacturing consulting company out of Temecula, CA.) That gig didn’t last long, mostly because I was disgusted by the executives I worked with as a consultant and moved on to other money-making ventures. But I kept writing in The Rat’s Eye, even though it didn’t seem like anyone was paying attention. About the same time, I had become a regular contributor to a regional motorcycle magazine, The Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly, and my column was called “Geezer with A Grudge.” I almost always wrote more articles than the magazine could use and I started storing my “extras” in the Geezer blog. A few years later, I started working, part time, at a music college, first as a technical support consultant and, later, as an instructor. I also had three music-related one-man businesses that I called “Wirebender Audio Services.” So, to promote those businesses, I started Wirebender Audio Rants.
I haven’t written much about motorcycles since I had to quit riding, last year, for reasons of old age. So, I haven’t paid much attention to that blog’s statistics. Today, I discovered that sometime ago the Geezer blog past 2 million views (2,028,204, as of today, in fact) and is averaging about 6500 views per month! So, I checked the other blogs and found that The Rat’s Eye View, my least likely candidate for readers had 393,543 views and for the past year has been averaging 3500 views per month and Wirebender Audio Rants and averaged 9100 views per month and a total of 332,501 views for the blog’s lifetime.
For a while, Google’s Ad Sense actually paid money for advertising links in the blog and the Geezer blog made me an average of $100/month for the advertising hits. A few years ago, Google decided to keep all but a few pennies of the advertising revenue to themselves and I deleted Ad Sense from all of my blogs. That was several (about 10) years ago and, since then I just write for the excuse H.L. Menken gave, “for the same reason cows give milk.”
The point I lamely tried to make with this essay’s title was that many things that we do, creatively and without much hope of notice, can pay some fun dividends if you last long enough. Way back in late 2020, I was still writing fairly regular Geezer columns and paying attention to the numbers. I was pretty impressed with myself when that blog made it to 1,000,000 hits. I know that’s pretty lame in a world where a Tik Tok or drunks-in-a-bar YouTube “influencer” can, apparently, easily gather 1,000,000 followers. My most “popular” blog, the Geezer, has a grand total of 90 followers and The Rat’s Eye has 2 and Wirebender has 14. I’d be embarrassed by those lame numbers, except that . . . I’m not.
My comparatively new Substack page, “T.W. Day Stories and Rants on Random Subjects,” has 24 “subscribers” (all free) and that page has had about 6,400 hits since it started in December of 2023. It has ben a slow, somewhat exponential, reader growth and I’ve made-little-to-no effort at promoting my page. My “biggest” month had a little over 900 hits. Every source I know of claims that reading isn’t something that many people bother with today. My wife, more typically, gets practically all of her knowledge from YouTube, which is a sure way to drive me from any room or gathering. I really don’t want to think about how many people use Tik Tok for that purpose. I never expected to be read as much as I’ve been on any of my Blogger blogs and I’m delighted with the slow progress of my Substack page. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone, even the critics, who has take the time, exercised the patience, and kept a rare skill alive by reading my essays.
Gratefully,
T.W. Day
