The number of views behind the reviews. #BookBlogger #BookBloggers #Blogger #Bloggers #BookBlog

When you’re bloggin’ for yourself,
And no-one is reading,
You write words for yourself,
You read your posts alone,
(Alone).

Why yes, before you ask I did start the post off by parodying the lyrics from the classic tune Estranged by Guns N’ Roses.🔫🌹

I often feel like nobody reads my reviews and that I am talking to myself only with the added effort of trying to find the words that make-up and form a review. I try not to look at the stats for my blog very often but if I’ve written a review that I’m pleased with and one that I think is good. Then, yeah, I’ll admit it, I’ll hold my hands up and I often find myself glancing at the stats to see how it’s doing. Inevitably, it won’t be doing as well as I had hoped which then leads down the road to ruin, the crumbling walls of questioning the quality of what I’ve written and the well of self-doubt.

Post views are something that most bloggers are very secretive about. Yes, some genuinely don’t care about them while others will look at them daily and analyse them. I often think that most other blogs have massively high post views compared to my own little blog and I don’t think that I’m alone in thinking that way either. We shouldn’t compare ourselves to others but I think that many of us believe that most (if not all) other blogs get far better views than our own and it can be disheartening feeling that way. The above isn’t going on any knowledge that I have, there’s no scientific research into it, it is a personal musing and it is only my own view of my own blog. Honestly, I am probably my own worst enemy where my blog is concerned.

I was thinking about the number of views that my reviews receive and I decided to run a poll on Twitter asking what number of page views do you usually get for a book review. I got what I think is a good turnout for voting and I received 338 votes (my thanks to all those who voted) in the poll. I will say that the poll was for reviews only and not other types of posts as generally speaking, at least, in my experience other types of posts like discussion posts do far better than book reviews and I wanted to focus solely on reviews. 

You can only have four poll options, ideally, there’d have been more choice but it is what it is and that falls on Twitter, not me.

The options I gave in the poll were between 1 – 100 views, between 100 – 500 views, between 500 – 1000 views and 1000 + views.

Now, obviously, there is a huge disparity between the numbers, say, someone who gets 120 views and someone else who gets 480 views is in the same category on the poll. Likewise, someone who gets 520 and someone else who gets 980 is in the same category too but! As I said, that is the fault of Twitter only allowing four voting options and I wanted to get the 1000 + category included in there as I often think that other bloggers get in the 1000’s of views for their reviews and I wanted to see if that was true or not.

The results from the poll are below:

• 1 – 100 views = 78%
• 100 – 500 views = 18%
• 500 – 1000 views = 3%
• 1000 + views = 1% 

So, you can see from the results that the lion’s share of bloggers receives between 1 – 100 views for their reviews with a massive majority of 78% voting in that category! Next up is the 100 – 500 views category with 18% and then we are into the very small percentages with 3% getting between 500 – 1000 views and only 1% saying that they get 1000 + views for their reviews.

I have to say that I am surprised by the results and I found them to be very eye-opening as I expected that the between 500 – 1000 views and the 1000 + views categories would both be far higher and that one of them would win the poll NOT the lowest numbered category which won by a landslide!

The poll is only a small snapshot of book blogs and there will be anomalies. You might get a review that absolutely tanks, drops out of the sky like a lead balloon and then, you might get another review that flies, like a rocket and it shoots to the sky.

The amount of views for a review is also in no way indicative of the quality of the blog, the blogger or the review either and there are many factors that you have to take into consideration too. Things like the genre of the book, the review rating, the book itself and whether it is hyped or not, whether the book is by a popular author or an unknown author, whether the author and publisher retweets and shares the review, how long you have been blogging for and the size of your following, how involved in the community you are and how many retweets and shares you get from other bloggers. So, yeah, as you can see there are lots of mitigating factors and variables that can all have an effect on how well a review actually does. 

There are many blogs out there who do have a far higher number of views (not including the huge blogs and websites because they absolutely kill it for views and for everything else too) than us, some that make out that they do (gotta be better hey folks) and some that will have a lower number of views too. However, the poll shows that out of all the blogs who voted most have near enough the same number of views (between 1 – 100 views with a massive majority of 78%) as each other.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter what the number of views you receive for a review is. I will say though that it is nice to know that you’re not talking to yourself, that somebody is reading and that somebody cares about your opinion on a book.

The point of this post, I don’t really know other than I often think that my stats are terrible and as I said, it can be disheartening to think that way. This poll shows that most of us all get around the same number of views and maybe next time we think that our blog isn’t very good, that our stats are dreadful and that we suck at blogging, well, perhaps, we will realise that we don’t. 🙂