I had a conversation a few days ago with a friend who asked me what I thought about blogging / podcasting / creating video content, specifically as it pertains to viewership and even more specifically as it pertains to NUMBERS of viewers for content we post to the internet.

There’s a lot of talk amongst the social media set about numbers and views and influence and what makes content “worth” creating.

Unfortunately, all that talk about numbers assumes that people are equals, when we most clearly are not. o_O

Authorities & Audiences

Let’s say, for instance, that you have 100 Facebook Friends and they’re all people that you’ve grown up with or met IRL (in real life) that share no particular concentration in any industry. Let’s also say that *I* have 2,434 Facebook Friends and you and I happen not to share very many mutual friends… Logically, if I post something, it’s more likely to receive responses, hits, views, whatever, because my listening audience is immensely larger than yours.

Let’s take that same scenario and change how you created and cultivated your audience of 100 FB Friends… Let’s say that you were an expert in a particular field and the people you reached out to and also accepted FB friend invites from were all involved in or interested in your chosen profession. Let’s say you had conversations with this specialized audience and they recognized you as an authority.. Someone who was known to have interesting, important & relevant things to say and similarly useful links to share.

NOW.. If you and I post about the same information at the same time, except it happens to be along the lines that you and your friends normally kick it about, my larger population is trumped by your way smaller one because your readers are PASSIONATE about your content and mine are not.

On top of that.. All this numbers-talk only takes into account first-tier connections. If my Twitter fanbase is 10 people, except one of those 10 people following me has 60,000 followers, I might not directly have a large audience, but someone following me might. Similarly.. If I have 10 and one of my ten followers has 10 and one of her ten followers has 10 and one of his ten followers has 1,000,000… You get the picture, so there’s no actual telling who’s going to receive wider distribution when they output content.

So.. Unless your ability to pay rent depends on how many readers/viewers you have, don’t worry about it. The number is entirely irrelevant unless you can make money by serving ads to those people. You might ask yourself what the point is of creating content if there aren’t going to be very many people watching…

Content For Whom?

First of all, you want to create content FOR YOURSELF.

Back in the day, when I was trying to decide what I wanted to blog about, my friend Penelope Trunk told me (paraphrasing) “You should blog about what you’re passionate about… or else you’re going to stop doing it”. That had to be THE most important thing I’ve ever heard about blogging and it’s absolutely true. I’m writing this post right this very second because I FEEL LIKE IT, and for no other reason. I’m enjoying thinking about it. I’m enjoying writing it. I’m going to enjoy posting it and receiving feedback about it. :D

Second, you want to create content for your Passionate Viewers.

Again, back in the day… I was discussing the creation and production of web shows with my friend Drew Olanoff and he told me his opinions about views vs viewERs. Basically, my experience up until that point had been with the technical side of creating videos and I had had little-to-no interaction with end-users, viewers that weren’t my personal friends, and certainly not entire communities of people who interact with each other based on a common love of or respect for a show.

Paraphrasing Drew’s point.. He felt that it was better to focus on your small amount of Passionate Viewers than to attempt to cater to a potentially way larger number of people that might drop by your show, watch an episode or two and bounce.

At the time, I didn’t understand why that would be, but I was willing to consider the theory. I eventually agreed entirely when my own shows & blogs gained an expanded audience and I got to experience the differences between the groups firsthand.

My stats have pretty consistently looked like this for the past few years.

93% Passers-By and 7% Regulars… Except the Regulars make up 17% of my visits.

I would certainly rather keep my current percentage of Regulars than increase my numbers of Passers-By at the expense of some of my Passionate Readers/Viewers.

While it would be nice to keep the current Regulars and convert some of the Passers-By into still more Regulars, I like to think about blogging relative to real life instead of relative to other, immensely more popular blogs.

Subscribers, Commenters, Lurkers & Passers-By

I currently have 118 people who subscribe to BillCammack.com by email. If you think about that… When was the last time that you gathered 118 people somewhere so they could listen to something you said? o_O … Probably “Never”, because I know that’s the answer for me.

So, each one of y’all 118 people, I appreciate you for tuning in. :) Thank You, and I try to keep things interesting around here. ;)

My actual subscriber number currently reads 244, because they add in people who subscribe via RSS and receive my blog articles in their feed readers. I’m sure a number of those are “bots” (robots, automated computer processes), but for those of y’all that are real people, Thanks for subscribing! :D

Even amongst subscribers, you have Lurkers, who read the articles but don’t comment directly on my blog. That doesn’t mean they aren’t sharing my posts with other people and discussing my ideas on other social networking sites & forums. I’m happy about that as well, because I don’t blog so people can come to my site. I blog because I feel like it and if someone else gets something out of it, that’s icing on the cake. If someone finds what I write to be entertaining, educational or useful, even better! :D

Then, You have the behind-the-scenes commenters.. The people that strike up conversations with me about my content when we run into each other at parties. The people that email or DM me to let me know what’s going on with them or that they enjoyed a particular post. It’s always gratifying to hear that someone got something out of an article I didn’t even have to write. It’s like when I happen to walk down a street or get into a particular subway car and tourists ask me for directions. I just happened to be there to point them in the right direction, and that’s always a good feeling.

The top level is the online commenters! :D .. I shouted out many of them 10 months ago in my last post of 2009: billcammack.com/2009/12/31/world-in-my-eyes-happy-new-year.

It’s the commenters that make my blog a community instead of a bunch of speeches by Bill Cammack. Lots of times, readers get more out of what the commenters share than what I initially posted!… I learn stuff from them also and I’m open to changing directions if someone has a convincing argument that things are actually different than I currently believe them to be.

So.. Thanks again, commenters! :D .. We almost have another full year together under our belts! :D

How Many Do You Need?

The way I see it, from my personal experience with online communities between 2006 and 2010, the only people you should be concerned with if you’re thinking about starting a blog or podcast or web series are 1) YOURSELF, and 2) the people who are genuinely interested in what you’re talking about and are willing to read, listen, watch and maybe even join in the conversation.

If that’s 100,000 people?… Fine… However, it’s ALSO fine if it’s 10 people.. five of whom are related to you. :)

If you feel like you NEED a bunch of people to consistently watch your show and click on your advertisements or else you’re not going to be able to MAKE your show, you have the wrong business model. Do it cheaper. Use fewer graphics. Spend fewer hours creating it. Edit it less. Use a webcam instead of a video camera. Output once a week instead of once a day. Output once a month instead of once a week. If you have something you want to express, just figure out how to do it within your budget & time constraints and make it happen!

In fact.. Sometimes, I’ll write an entire blog post or make a video just so ONE PERSON can see it (or maybe a specific, small set of people). In those cases, if 1,000 people watch the video and the person/people I made it for didn’t, I wasn’t successful in communicating my expression to them.

OTOH.. If 10 people watch a video and I know that the three people I made it for saw it?… Mission Accomplished! :D

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This season of my video show/stream/whatever is entitled “Delusions of Grandeur”, basically because the only way I could swindle myself into doing it was to pretend that I had an audience. I already know everything I’m typing, and I’ve already seen everything that I post as a video, so the only reason to post them is for other people to see/read them, for whatever reasons they might have.

The problem with this is that since the audience isn’t real, I do whatever I feel like doing. If I feel like playing guitar, I do that. If I feel like talking to myself, I do that. If I feel like making a 15-minute documentary about Harlem, I do that.

Because of this, there are lots of different reasons that people visit my site. They visit from all over the planet, but they basically arrive through a Google search. Maybe a couple of times a day, someone’s actually looking for me (or someone named Bill Cammack), but the vast majority of the time, people are looking for ONE INSTANCE of a topic that they were thinking about at the time and decided to look up on google, like Dating women in NYC and they end up here.

I know this because web sites compile stats (statistics). People go to major lengths to compile and analyze statistics in order to determine what’s working for them, what’s not working and what they want to do next or differently, going forward. There are some major problems with “analyzing stats”, however… rather… I *should* say that if you’re not sure what you’re looking at, you’re going to have a skewed view of your readership/viewership… AND… Even if you *DO* know what you’re looking at, you’re still not receiving information which accurately depicts what’s really happening with your media.

Originally, I thought stats were the answer to DoG, because you would be sure about the size of your audience. Unfortunately, stats are merely general indications of possibilities… not even PROBABILITIES in case you decide to post something similar in the future.

Stats are like getting hit in the side of the head with a tomato.

If you’ve ever tried to hit someone walking down the street with a tomato, you know what I mean. It’s hard as hell, right? :D Wind conditions… Judging how far they’re going to travel in the time it takes the tomato (or egg, if it’s Halloween) to cross the street… Anyway… The point is that when you post stuff to the internet, you’re walking down the street. People are on the other side of the street, throwing tomatoes at you, except you don’t know it because they never hit you. As long as it doesn’t pass your head close enough to make that sound or smash on the gate next to you, letting you know what time it is, you’re going to keep walking down the street like nothing’s happening.

When you make a post, it’s the same way. Unless you see stats or receive feedback from people, it feels like nobody’s throwing tomatoes at you. Thus, DoG is the remedy for inertia in that you imagine a bunch of tomato-throwers. MEANWHILE, depending on how you monitor your statistics, you’re actually missing A LOT OF PEOPLE that *did* hit you.

For example, Tyme White informed me that since I had been separating sections of my entries using the “more” tag, people with feed readers were only receiving the information up to that “more”, and unless they clicked through to my site, they couldn’t read the rest of the post. I removed my “more” tags, because I’d rather have people able to read what they want however they want than have them skip the rest of the article because they didn’t feel like accessing my site… or maybe they COULDN’T access my site, because they pre-loaded their readers and don’t currently have fast internet access or any internet access at all.

Liz Burr informed me that I could use FeedBurner to catch my audience’s feed reader stats. I wasn’t interested in going that route, because I used feedburner for my video blog for well over a year, and although it’s good to see which videos of yours are going out so that you can spot trends or popular videos that you’ve done, there’s something really important that it doesn’t tell you…..

WHO! IT! IS! :/

This is why your stats are a tomato to the SIDE of your head. When you get hit with it, you STILL don’t know who threw it! :D

When I used to monitor my iTunes feed with feedburner, if I saw that in one day, 100 of my videos were downloaded once each, I knew I had a new subscriber. I didn’t know WHO that person was, AT. ALL. Therefore, I’m content with my current stats setup as an indication of trends of random people, and I’m not interested in even MORE stats of people who read my posts although I have no clue who they are.

IME, the net is immensely asynchronous and voyeuristic. I’m ‘guilty’ of the same thing. I don’t leave comments on EVERY video I watch or blog post I read. The environment only makes DoG worse, because in one’s own mind, your audience expands and contracts depending on how you feel about what you’re doing. If you feel like nobody’s watching… They aren’t. If you feel like Everybody’s Looking At Youuuuuu….. They Are! Ultimately, there’s no reality at all. It’s just you… floating messages in bottles….

I had a couple of experiences recently that made me want to ‘talk’ about stats. The other day, I was hanging out with a friend of mine, and I went to get out my iPod Nano (which I won in the NewTeeVee Pier Screenings game show audience survey contest. Thanks, Om & crew! :D) to show her this video I had done, and before I even got it out of my pocket, she was like “oh. I saw that.”…. :/ ….. This is always a shocking experience, because I don’t actually HAVE DoG. If I did, I would have assumed that she and everyone else with a computer had watched/read my material. It’s one of the few surprising things in life… finding out that someone knows more than I thought they did. :)

This is where I internalized one of the useless aspects of stats… for me, at least… What good does it do me to know that three people in Australia and two in the UK watched my video if it doesn’t help me to understand that my friend I’m hanging out with right now has already watched my video? I’ve had this happen to me lots of times. Most recently, I got in a car with my cousin who had some very interesting things to say about my Fame post. This was ANOTHER shocking experience, because I wasn’t aware that she even knew that I text blogged at all. It took me a while to get up to speed on that conversation, because I totally wasn’t prepared to discuss an aspect of my existence that I didn’t know she knew about… much less that she had thought about at all OR would have had any opinions about it she felt like expressing to me. :D

The other interesting ‘stats experience’ was reading Mike Hudack‘s post on the blip.tv blog called “On Stats”. 99% of the videos on my site are served from blip.tv, so I found the first paragraph very interesting:

There’s been a lot of discussion over the last few days about how video sites count viewership. This is an extremely important and constructive conversation to have. In general, blip is one of the most conservative video sites on the Web in counting viewership. We only count one view per IP address per session and we have a number of very stringent controls in place to prevent gaming viewership numbers, whether that gaming is intentional or not. We believe that it’s in our interests — and in the interests of the overall Web video industry — that we be conservative in measuring viewership. Failing to be conservative invites a backlash from advertisers, investors and content creators as they realize that they can’t trust viewership metrics offered by major Web video platforms. We don’t want to invite such a backlash. We want to be conservative from the outset.

Let’s say an IP address is the “name” of your modem that connects to the internet. If I understood the statement about the counting of blip.tv video views correctly, that means that if you watch a video of mine, then you play it again, it only counts as one view. It will also count as one view if your roommate watches it from the same internet connection. Similarly, if you tell your whole office to watch it and they’re all accessing the same router, they all count as hits from the same IP address. I’ll have to find out how long a “session” lasts, and like I said, I’m not sure I have the exact understanding of how blip handles the count. However, this makes sense, because it stops people from doing the old YouTube trick of refreshing their videos over and over and making themselves look popular & talented when they’re not.

The point for me, as a content creator, is that before I read this, I thought the count was the count. I was actually subtracting numbers of views from my videos. This video, for instance, currently has 315 views:

Now… Besides the fact that I know more people than that saw this particular video because Kfir Pravda showed it at a conference he was speaking at in Israel, I would have assumed that maybe 200 people watched the video and the other 115 were re-runs. Of course, this doesn’t take into account situations like people downloading my videos and showing them to people on their computers or iPods, as I was attempting to do when my friend informed me she had already seen it.

You see how, again, in the realm of video, there’s the exact same “over/under” as there is in text blogging. Almost simultaneously, you feel like the numbers you’re seeing underrepresent your viewership AND overrepresent it.

Also, like I mentioned before, the numbers are useless anyway, unless you’re trying to sell a show, get sponsorship for a show or make money through revenue-sharing. Even if the stats tell me that a video of mine was watched 60 times from IP addresses in NYC, there are MILLIONS OF PEOPLE THAT LIVE HEEEEEERE!!! :D On top of that, according to Facebook, I have 271 friends in the New York, NY area. So, if I assume (ridiculously) that only people that have heard of me before are watching my videos, and not a single “random”, I still only have about a 1 in 4 chance of guessing who those 60 are. :)

The obvious solution here is to fuhgeddabouddit! Forget about stats altogether. They’re making DoG worse instead of better. More confusing instead of less so. The point of DoG in the first place was to kick-start my creativity process and answer the question “Why should I do something, film it and post it… instead of just doing it and enjoying it for myself?”

The answer, strangely enough, isn’t in the stats or the crowds. It’s not even in the audience of ten.

It’s in the One….

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