Will Our Real Audience Please Stand Up?

OK. Permit me a moment of confusion. Because I am very confused at this point.

As I wrote back in November 2017, before we went dark (but not really, I guess?), we’ve been faced with the fact that a lot of our dot-com traffic seems to be comprised of bots — search engine bots, Google bots, SEO bots, malware bots, spyware bots, and who know what else bots — and it really felt like we were spinning our wheels and putting out a lot of effort for very little return.

Since we re-launched in January, it seems like things have gotten better in certain respects. Engagement is higher, which means some of you are commenting and responding to our content, especially over on our YouTube channel, SciFi4Me TV. And that’s great. Subscriptions are up since our livestream run at Star Wars Celebration, and that has allowed us to get our monetization tools back. Fantastic!

But …

But our traffic on the dot-com side of things remains low, and I’m still trying to figure out why. Because when you look at the statistics and analytics and all of the other data and numbers and such, we should have a higher view count than we actually do. Except a lot of those numbers don’t match up.

For example, as of this writing, WordPress shows that we’ve had 308 unique visitors and 500 individual views on our site for May. Whereas Google Analytics show that we’ve had 336 users with 405 “sessions” (what they call views).

Now, here’s where it gets interesting (and confusing): according to that same WordPress statistic display, we have 685 people following this site through an e-mail subscription, which means you get an e-mail every time we post something on the dot-com side of things (notifications in other apps is a completely different thing). But that same e-mail subscription widget also says we have 5,718 subscribers!

What the what?

So, which is it? Is it 685 or is it 5,718? Is there a way it can be both? Maybe. Could be the 685 are unique subscriptions that came through WordPress itself. And the others could be signups straight from the web site.

But either way, it’s more than the traffic we’re getting on the regular. Which begs the question: are any of you reading our content? Are you taking the time to see what we post? Because if you’re not, we need to make some changes that make it more interesting for you as the reader. Which means what? What do we change up to get you to stick around and consume the fruits of our labor?

We’re not doing clickbait. We’re not taking a political side. We’re not participating in the Culture War.

Do you want more reviews? More news articles? Is there something we’re not covering enough? Inquiring minds want to know, so please leave us a comment with your thoughts. Or use the contact form and send us an e-mail to let us know how we can continue improving. Remember the “Me” in SciFi4Me… is YOU.

Let us know how we’re doing. We listen to all of you.