I got the idea from Fred Clark. To celebrate the 5th anniversary of Patheos, we were asked to list our top posts. But everyone does that, and so it seems so uninteresting – especially when a list of the most popular posts on this blog are always visible in the sidebar. And so I thought I would ask a more interesting question with less obvious answers: which are the least popular posts of all time on Exploring Our Matrix?
As I started looking into it, I found this post as the very last entry on Google Analytics:
It is a post about a video which is no longer on YouTube, about people concerned that a school lunchroom scanner might be connected to the mark of the Beast. It has multiple likes on Facebook and several comments – but Google Analytics says it only got one pageview. Might be a glitch, but there you go.
After that, Google Analytics lists lots of hits to translations of pages, and a gazillion search terms.
Then there are a lot of posts tied at 3 pageviews – most of which are from before my blog moved to Patheos, and so that is the number of visits since the move to the new site. Among them are “Funny Video Overload,” “Rather Umid,” and “Blurflurgh,” as well as posts like “Scriabin Archive,” on which the formatting was affected by the move from Blogger to Patheos. I have no idea how many visits they had prior to the move to Patheos. Surprisingly, some posts from 2008 have one more pageview than many from 2010 – take, for instance, the post “I Want To Believe…And To Doubt.” But again, all of this is older traffic, from before I was using Google Analytics, and so that it has any views at all is interesting.
From a few of the more recent posts scattered down in the lower levels of the analytics, I suspect that some of the genuinely least popular posts are ones in which I did little more than link to someone else’s blog. Round-ups can be useful, but quick single links to elsewhere less so, and so I’m glad I’ve moved away from doing that.
And then there’s the post “Ouuuuch”, the seeming unpopularity of which is inexplicable.
In the process of looking into this, I’ve learned that it is harder to figure out what is unpopular than what is popular.
The fact that you have read to the end of this rather inane post means a lot to me. It is the fact that people like you read what I write, and take time to interact, that keeps me doing this. So please do leave a comment, and tell me what your own personal all time least favorite post on this blog was! Who knows, it might just keep me from posting something similar again…
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