I "went sideways" for a while, today.
That is, I suddenly decided to spend a little time visiting one of my old blogs, and even did a little "house cleaning" while I was there.
When I say "old blog," this was one of my first niche interest blogs; the first post went live in September 2002.
As always, I spent a little time poking around in the visitor logs.
In some senses, the contrast between my Hive blog and my "HSP Notes" blog are striking.
The 260-odd article length posts over there have been viewed close to one million times. On average, that's some 3,800 sets of eyeballs per post.
I had to to back and double check that... and yes, some of the more popular posts have been looked at some 50,000 times.
My average post on Hive probably gets 20-25 views... on a good day.
This isn't intended to be some kind of pissing content over readership, nor a "Hive bashing session."
Mostly, I'm sharing this as an illustration that yes, people DO read blog posts! What's more, there's still plenty of readership for "long form content."
Granted, my niche audience is generally aged 40+ and has the ability to actually read something for a few minutes.
So, this brought me to my next line of thinking... writing for an audience external to Hive."
Bottom line... there isn't much incentive, is there? And maybe that's the underlying reason why the Hive community sometimes seems a little "stagnant." Everybody here is writing for the internal Hive audience, because that's where the upvotes are going to come from, and thus where the rewards are going to come from.
@taskmaster4450 talks a lot about the importance of the "flywheel effect."
Once up to speed, heavy flywheels keep spinning with relatively little new effort.
Which made me think about these large "curation accounts" a number of Hive communities have, as well as the individual curator/whales out there.
How about a curation project given over purely to reward worthy OFF-SITE content?"
Phrased a little differently: I write an article on Hive that I promote to my external connections related to the topic of the post. In turn, it garners several hundred external pageviews... and that is what triggers a nice upvote from the curation service.
I mean, you have to motivate people where they are, and a lot of people are at the point of trying to earn rewards.
So what does this have to do with the whole flywheel thing?
Well, if people see that they can get rewarded for creating "external" content, they will create more external content, which will bring more external eyeballs to Hive, which will increase activity here, encouraging people to create more external content... and that sets the whole thing in motion, if you see what I'm saying.
I plan to experiment a bit with "external content" this month... just to see where it goes.
Thanks for stopping by and have a great week ahead!
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Created at 2024-09-03 01:44 PDT
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