I've pondered on the existence of JSVB, now at five hundred and one posts. I've met my goals regarding this blog, and I wonder how far I should keep going. Not in the aw-jeez what am I gonna do now? way that I see in some blogs, but more of an examination of my ambitions with this thing.
Blogs are designed to function with Internet media, but their importance has waned in comparison with the popularity of social sites like Facebook and Twitter. A blog tends to be more work for the both the blogger and the audience, and it's slower to publish and get feedback. I don't intend for JSVB to be social, but the social function is built in whether I want it or not. I get statistics on viewers and an idea of who composes my audience.
While I do have many nice people visit JSVB and even a few will e-mail me with comments, by far most of my visitors have come to borrow/lift/steal the artwork. And that's if they are human. Lately, I have also been getting a load of hits from spambots, automated search programs that look for unprotected blogs to infect. Five hundred pages of material does attract that sort of element.
After 500 posts, I have five regular viewers. One hundred posts per viewer, looks like. I've also have around 11,000 hits, which is over 5,000 hits a year. Profitable blogs that earn enough money to live on should have at least ten thousand hits a month. Statistics, therefore, can be depressing. I'm more than nine-tenths away from being profitable after two years' worth of work.
I find the number ten thousand to be very interesting. There's a saying in Japanese animation: "It takes ten thousand tries to get a drawing right". One drawing a day three hundred days out of the year would take me over thirty-three years to render. By the time I am retirement age , I'll finally get the hang of this. That seems to be par for the course for many visual artists.
So, five hundred and one JSVB Posts down, nine thousand four hundred and ninety-nine more to go.
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