Every year at this time, I used to do a statistics column looking at my blog’s performance over the past year. But as I wrote last time around,
…it’s getting a lot harder to compile these yearly statistics columns; social media platforms like WordPress just can’t seem to leave well enough alone, and they’ve steadily made it more difficult to write and edit my posts (much less find out the kind of statistics I used to be able to find with a single click)…Furthermore, Google continues to censor search results so as to curtail traffic to “adult” blogs like this one; while I used to get a huge number of serendipitous hits, my site is now found almost entirely by people specifically looking for it or following direct links…unless things change dramatically in the next year, this may well be the last annual statistics column I do…
Well, they didn’t change dramatically; in fact, it was more of the same. WordPress has continued to hide statistics and Google has continued to hide search results; early last year they made another change to their algorithms so that the number of daily hits on my blog is now similar to the number of subscribers, which is much lower than it once was despite my driving large amounts of traffic here via Twitter. I don’t think it’s too fanciful or paranoid to assume that this is part and parcel of the Establishment’s drive to ghettoize adult content on the internet; Google, Facebook and Company won’t be satisfied until they turn the entire internet into a “walled garden” such as AOL once offered. I don’t believe that will ever fully be accomplished, but in the meantime it has certainly hurt the visibility of this and other sex worker rights blogs. And that, I think, is ample reason for retiring this feature; as I wrote last time, “After…so many other changes, this one is really quite minor“.
