Welcome to the other side! Glad to see you 😅
From now on I am deliberately handicapped when it comes to judging how many readers I have. I still see stats in feedburner (that’s a Google service that I’ve used since 2006 to give my RSS feed a constant, never-changing address), but other than that, there is no Google Analytics, no StatCounter nor anything else. In other words: I can’t track you.
It’s not that I couldn’t do it on a static blog. Everybody does. It’s only that I think I don’t need that any more. I’ve done it for a long time and I’ve learned that I cannot increase my readership without investing a lot of time. And even then, there is an upper limit, that I can’t break with my type of content. In its best times the blog had about 500 readers per day, on good days a few thousands. 90% of them came for a handful of posts.
I had one of the first “user experience reviews” of the Nikon D300 online, and for one lens, the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC, I had the only review for a long time. I did some comparisons between DxO versions, I produced some Photoshop tutorials, and that drew most of the traffic.
If you’ve done that for a few years, it stops having appeal. It is just work. As I always say, thanks, I have a job 😃
I’ve also stopped having ads on the blog. I used to have amazon ads, mainly as a means to link to music, but I’ve removed them as well. They didn’t earn me money anyway, and nowadays they would make the blog count as “commercial” - with all the implications this has in times of the GDPR.
Therefore: if you like what you see, and if you want to do me a favor: drop me a comment 😀