Not Worth It!

 

The contrast and the irony of a writer! Several years back I celebrated the achievement of a million views of the previous version of this blog. I just did the formality for formality’s sake as I was well aware of the real scenario. I started my blog in all sincerity and the zeal of a writer enthralled by the coming of a desktop to my writing table and the exciting opportunities of writing online. Back in 2006 when I had my personal computer I started contributing articles/stories/snippets to many of the online magazines and article directories. Then I started my blog the next year and for two years or so found little time to do justice to it. I really opened up from around 2010 and by that time views were increasing. I consider the year of 2012 to be the most productive when I think I wrote blogposts almost every day. At that time Google was having a very prestigious page-rank algorithm. The page-rank number for my blog was zero at first, then 2 and then it climbed to a respectable 3! When I achieved the page-rank of 4 I was ecstatic! Perhaps thanks to a steady stream of daily hits my AdSense application was approved and I was just thrilled to have Google AdSense ads running on my blog!

However, over the years I began to have doubts about the viewers or the hits. Most of the hits were coming from some countries which were totally ignored by Google Analytics. Then, while I was overjoyed by the clicks on the ads the subsequent invalidation of most of the clicks by AdSense disappointed me immensely. So, I slowly came to know of the real picture: that the hits were coming abundantly from the fraudsters and the bots or the leeches called book-promoters.  Igniting my own analytics I presumed my genuine readers to be just around 10 or so! Not worth it! So I deleted my blog around two years back! But since I wrote more than a thousand posts with lot of effort I decided to take a backup and thought that there was no harm in leaving them available online still. Therefore, I started the present blog version with the backup. As expected, the views have been low and measly with sudden spikes at times that invariably came from one or two places. Again, not respected by the Analytics! And at the moment I count my genuine readers to be just 1 or at the most 2! Not worth it at all! However, sticking to my earlier pious thoughts I’m not going to delete it again! Instead, it’s amply clear that I don’t care a damn about the intervals between my posts! Regularity abandoned thereby!

And today! My blog has achieved the landmark of 50k hits! Ha! Ha! Ha! Some celebration!

Ditto with my books most of which I produced after I retired from service. Hardly any genuine readers! Forget about feedback or ratings or reviews! But the contentment/consolation of having the books available in the public domain remains! They’re going to stay there, someone reads or not! I’m happy with that! Although I lack the resources for book marketing, enhancing visibility, buying reviews and even buying awards, I detest creating this kind of an artificial ambience, mostly superlative but false, to entice readers to my books even if I had loads of dough!

Not worth it! But I’m honest to my profession and so am continuing with my writing. I hope to add more books to my kitty as long I keep fit and kicking! Have a blast, if anybody around!