statistics are giving me a complex

[anghraine]

Livejournal statistics, that is.

Once upon a time, I cherished the happy (?) delusion that my blogs were so obscure that only the handful of people on my f-list would ever read them.  If I didn't get any comments, I assumed nobody was reading them.  I didn't mind, since I write as much as to work through my own thoughts as to have conversations about shared interests, though the latter is always usually enjoyable.

Then I noticed that I'd occasionally get comments from perfect strangers.  Not necessarily anonymice, either (though I've had a few of those -- in one particularly winning case, a self-appointed Official Jane Austen Troll Descendant) -- just other lj people I didn't know.  I figured I popped up on searches and left it at that.

Then "My Guests" came along.  As an inveterate lurker, I was a little alarmed -- but not that much.  It seemed like a nice way of saying 'hey, your journal's cool' without having to speak to anybody.  Speaking to people is not one of my strong points.  (I'm sure this is deeply shocking.)  And hey, I could just stay logged out if I didn't want my username to register.  Besides, I was mildly curious to see if anybody other than my handful of friends actually read anything.  I didn't think so, but it'd be cool --

OMG IS THAT HER?  

Yes.  Apparently, people I've admired from a discreet distance read my journal.  Also there are people I don't quite fangirl to that extent, but are well-known enough that I've heard of them.  Also there are people I know nothing about.  Also there are invisible people. 

It's at once very flattering and rather disconcerting.

Then I got access to the stat function, which made my chart-loving heart go pitter-patter.  It seemed I got about forty visitors a day, though it'd jump up to a hundred a few times a month, and sometimes even up to 300 (usually on an Elizabeth Watches A New Hope day, which is comforting).  Okay, fine.  When I started posting more regularly, it seemed to level out at a hundred-some.  Yay!  Though I still have on idea who the vast majority of these people are, but still:  readers!  

Then I clicked on today's stats, expecting the usual:  around 112 unique page views, maybe 40 from all visitors and 12 from lj users.  Instead, it was one of the high ones at 279 305, even though it's still morning.  That does happen periodically, and the proportions always seem to stay in the same ballpark -- like 92/36/7 jumping to 169/58/19, or something like that.  But today's jumped from 151/44/11 to 305/246/6.  Now, I'm not good with numbers, but this looks to me like a couple hundred non-lj people all decided to click on my entries and I don't know why -- or what they're looking at or where they come from. 

I keep getting this urge to glance furtively over my shoulder but OH YEAH THAT DOESN'T HELP.

*twitchy*

Comments

[tree]

i've always found those sorts of statistics to be fairly useless because they're totally without context. at least if you have some sort of external tracker feature, it tells you whatever linking URL a visitor came in on, etc.

i never opted into the whole 'my guests' thing because, ew, so i just get the regular graph thingies. and they make no sense to me, really. admittedly, i haven't looked at them in months, but i just did so out of curiosity after i read your entry. and desipte not having posted anything since 20/11, for some reason on 2/12 i got 66 pages views from 13 unique IPs, of whom 8 were LJ users. what the hell were these people looking at? i mean, i usually assume that most if not all page views are from people loading their friends pages or friendfriends. but, not after almost two weeks, obviously. and then on 18/12 another spike of 55.

so either a whole bunch of people are stalking me, or the numbers are bogus. then again i'm kind of freaked out by the email i got indicating someone has tried to get my LJ password reset. so maybe they are stalking me.

wait, what was my point? oh, yeah: i think the numbers are bogus.

[hl]

Not necessarily stalking you, though! I mean, I do end up following people to their journal and reading around a bit if I find them interesting/if someone links to them/if in any random way I get somehow linked to them/one of their posts in a comm/one of their posts in their journal. I think it's fair to think there are any number of people doing the same.

[tree]

well, yeah, i do the same thing. i'm not discounting that. at the same time, i don't think that explains, in my case, 13 unique IP addresses accessing my journal to create 66 individual page views, on a day where i didn't make a post (and hadn't made a post in almost two weeks). even if we say one of those IP addresses was me looking at something, that's 12 other people who would have had to be randomly linked from somewhere. that might be likely for you, because you have a wider reading list and post about more wide-ranging things, but for me it's extremely unlikely.

so, no, i don't really think people are stalking me. ;) i would be the moast boring stalkee evar. i just think LJs numbers are not reliable when dealing with anyone other than logged-in LJ users.