Freewrite || day 4

Why Are My Views Declining?

And other questions to ask about writing and stats

When it comes to side hustles, stats are important — they are the metric for understanding what people like and what pieces aren’t working.

When it comes to social media, it’s the same story — in a space where the focus is on sharing your thoughts and ideas with the world, you’d likely be curious just are far-reaching those ideas travel.

So it’s natural that we ask these questions in order to better understand how our writing relates to the rest of the world, particularly to readers dedicated to supporting us.

When you see those numbers, what do they mean to you?

Sometimes, we see stats as just numbers and forget what they’re truly telling us. The stats we see are a culmination of people’s online behaviours, from how they read your pieces, what headlines capture their attention, etc.

As a psychology-researcher-in-training, I’m often reminded to, yes, understand the numbers, but to go further and understand what the numbers mean in terms of behaviour.

You can get a statistical difference of 0.2 seconds, meaning that mathematically, two groups may be different on some variable, but does that 0.2 seconds tangibly mean something? If we’re talking about the timescale of certain quick thought processes, then maybe. If we’re talking about the difference between larger-scale behaviours, honestly, even if it was statistically significant, does anyone care?

So when it came to seeing my readership views, readthroughs and claps declining, I often think beyond to societal context to understand what’s going on. Sure, sometimes my numbers decline simply because my craft is declining or my headlines aren’t as good this month, and I fully acknowledge that.

But sometimes, tangible environmental factors are at play. The pandemic itself showed me decline in two different ways.

My Views Declined At the Depths of the COVID pandemic

My views declined at the worst of the COVID pandemic, where each day brought higher numbers of infected and deaths than the last. It doubly declined during a time when specific areas of the world were impacted severely.

So when my views declined during that time, I didn’t think about the few cents to dollars I might have lost, but I reflected on just how many of these lost views translated to people who had to take time off from writing to take care of themselves and lost ones.

There are writers I was avidly following a year ago who abruptly stopped writing and never came back. I can only hope that they simply found a different hobby or career offline and have been living differently, but I know that at the scale that I saw this happening and in coinciding world events, this is likely not the explanation for all of the people who left.

My Views also Declined At the “End” of the pandemic

My views also declined when the US vaccination rates reached a certain threshold, and shops and restaurants began opening up full-time again.

This was an odd time, particularly since American influencers and content creators all over social media started going to big sports events and documenting their lives in crowds again, while the rest of the world still waited on vaccines to come and lockdowns to lift.

But my views declining then weren’t bad news — it’s fantastic news that at least in some parts of the world, we were seeing that things could get better. People got to meet with their family again. Grandparents getting to snuggle their pandemic-born grandchildren for the first time. Finally, eating food at a restaurant that I, not a chef, made.

What this all means to me

Sure, when I see a decline in views or interactions, I still take a moment to an audit on whether the way I’ve written has changed, or whether topics need updating.

But more than that, I make sure to factor that, I don’t know, maybe we were in a pandemic (and for some of us, still are), and that a significant portion of our lives were impacted and changed.

If people aren’t reading my dumb poems about ketchup sandwiches anymore because they’re out there starting up a new small business selling ketchup sandwiches, that’s a win for us all. Especially the ketchup sandwich community.

What do the numbers mean to you as a writer?

Numbers, at the end of the day, still matter, especially when writing and/or social media form your bread and butter.

On the other hand, I’ve also been so obsessed with numbers to an unhealthy degree in my youth that I review my writing stats from a different angle than many.

I used to obsess over my weight

An unfortunate part of my adolescence is that it directly coincided with the 2000s, an era of #thinspo in complete absence of any #BodyPositivity discussion, particularly in an era where being a teenager meant every emotion was big and looks mattered too much.

Sure, it would make a difference on my overall weight eventually if I made a habit of eating a pint of ice cream every night.

But the fact that I would obsess over whether I walked 9930 steps or 10020 steps, or whether a moderately sized lemon is 8 calories or 12 calories (estimated, I’ve no idea how many calories are in a lemon and at this point in my life, do not want to look it up).

I’m hoping this weight example really resonates for people who have dieted at some point in their life but looked back to see how obsessive some of the tracking methods and rules were despite not really impacting anything on the whole.

The body does what it does and you only have a certain degree of control over it.

I used to obsess over grades, too

If my food obsession doesn’t seem extreme, maybe consider the way that I obsessed over my grades too. In high school, I obsessed over every percentage point. I tracked every minute of every day to ensure that I was squeezing in time to study more.

Sure, a more reasonable example of managing your time for studying may be to consider gaming for 1 hour rather than 2 hours a night during exam season so you can switch that 1 hour towards studying but still have time to rest.

But I was putting my study notes in plastic pockets so I can maximize on studying even in the shower.

The one extra hour of not gaming probably would make some sort of a difference in studying over time, but did the 15 minutes I got in between shampoo being in my eyes and bending down to wash my legs really build towards better grades?

Did it really make that much of a difference that I couldn’t focus on getting clean?

All this to say, I learned not to obsess over writing stats

What I learned from these experiences is that, while you have some control over certain variables to influence a number of things, you have to stick to looking at the bigger picture.

Regardless of how much I fixated on my weight, natural things like bloating on my period or puberty itself added factors beyond my control that meant input of calories and movement didn’t output an exact weight. It wasn’t that simple of an equation.

Regardless of how much I fixated on my grades, I couldn’t account for fluctuations in what kinds of questions we may get in an exam and whether it was presented in the way that I’d studied for it. I can’t account for that one guy next to me in the exam who didn’t get stopped by the proctor for opening a whole damn bag of potato chips and eating it noisily, crunchingly throughout the entire exam.

Regardless of how much you fixate on your writing stats, you cannot predict how life and world events change what people end up doing with their time. You might be able to do what you can with good writing, good headlines and good self-promotion, but you might still fall victim to a changing algorithm. Or, declining views might actually be a sign of post-pandemic healing and that instead of reading your “how to entertain oneself during a pandemic” they are simply now living the lives they missed for the past year and a half. And actually, that’s fantastic news.

The middle ground

This is an entire rant to say, yes, I check my numbers, but I check for patterns over time rather than minute-by-minute (or even day-by-day) fluctuations.

Look for patterns and enact change to influence the bigger patterns, but don’t let little blips here and there freak you out. You had no control over them, and that’s okay.

Live your life.

Make a ketchup sandwich. Heck, open a ketchup sandwich restaurant.

Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and I really do like ketchup sandwiches. Ps, you can listen to this and other poems re-imagined in podcast form!

^ by Samedra Carter