A Blog Does Not Need "Analytics"
Original: A blog does not need “analytics”
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The debate rages on: do bloggers really need analytics to gauge their audience's interests? Some commenters argue that analytics are a necessary evil for bloggers seeking to expand their reach, while others contend that they're a tool of surveillance capitalism, driving the very ads that enable invasive tracking. As one commenter quipped, banning ads altogether could be the simplest solution, while another noted that the trend is actually moving in the opposite direction – with ad blockers facing bans and content migrating to social media. The discussion reveals a spectrum of opinions, from those who see analytics as essential for understanding their audience to those who believe bloggers can gauge interest simply by engaging with their readers directly.
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I am still amazed how anyone can stand surfing the web without.
If a service is good, I see no wrong on paying for that.
Unfortunately those willing to pay, are the most valuable tracking and advertisement target.
> I realised that knowing about my website visitors had zero effect on anything in the real world.
Perhaps that's true for them? But you don't have to try too hard to think of legitimate reasons why basic analytics are useful to any blog author who is trying to increase their reach, like knowing what topics are of most interest to their audience, when to post for bets result, comparing different styles of post etc.
They still have valid points against the intrusion of data gathering, but it's simply inaccurate to claim there's no benefit to the data.
Why would I want to read a blog like that? That's hack writing 101. There's a million of those writers shovelling out that drivel on LinkedIn (which sells them all the analytics they need to do it).
I want to read blogs by people who are passionate about their topic and really take the time to become an expert (if they aren't already). They don't need to know anything about me to write about their topic.
Both of those are extreme positions.
Seriously, fans are awful. If they found you for doing what you want to do, keep doing what you want to do. Don't let the fans guide you too much.
If they paid any attention to their fans they would've been playing "Love Me Do" for decades as their millions of screaming preteen girl fans slowly turned into senior citizens.
If you care about a topic you're going to care about a community you build and participate in around that topic. You don't need marketing-focused analytics to do that. You just need to keep writing and engaging with people in the comments.
Demography is the genre of analytic.
Ranking comments by quality is absolutely tangential to analytics. It’s processing feedback, and rearranging the pangs in orders to make it more pleasant to readers… it’s real close to a-b testing.
That's not what you described. You described a blog writtten by someone who wants to increase their reach.
Uh, because you find the content interesting?
Friend, there are many other ways to care about your audience without being a whimsical stalker from high up.
I didn't downvote but want to try to explain some of the mindset of some of the authors who do care about analytics and how it affects what they work on.
The 2 different activities need to be separated:
(1) passionate about a _topic_
vs
(2) passionate about _writing_about_ a topic.
Some people need some validation from a growing audience (i.e. see visitor stats) to continue to work on (2).
An example of this I came across was a analyst who was really knowledgeable about tele-communications, cell towers, datacenters, etc. He wrote some blogs and created videos about how the industry players work. It was really good analytical work. Unfortunately, he didn't gain a big audience following from it and quit after just 10 months.
He's still in the industry and I'm sure he's still "passionate" about the topic of next gen cell towers, etc. Just no longer passionate about blogging into an empty void.
One could then argue, "why does an author need to care about blogging to an empty void?!?". I don't know what to say. I guess it's just humans being humans and some want a little social proof that whatever they put a lot of time into is useful to more people than a tiny niche audience.
In my case, there’s a social proof element, but it’s also nice to know if I’m basically talking to myself or if there’s somebody out there listening. If it’s the former I feel kind of silly, like someone sitting in an empty room muttering to themselves might, plus writing takes time and energy that I could be putting towards something else. You know how there’s some meals that feel worth cooking if there’s even one other person who’ll be eating, but not if it’s just yourself? It’s like that.
This is information that’s irrelevant to a person who is merely passionate about a topic and wants to write and share about it. It’s information used solely for increasing engagement and making money.
How do I frame it? Is this for a math audience or a programming audience? If for programmers, are we talking about tricks to make it faster on modern x86_64 platforms or when you need to do voodoo on a microcontroller? If for modern x86_64 platforms, is this a short, punchy article empowering people with a new trick? Is it a long, dry article empowering other experts with nitty, gritty details? Do I frame it in terms of some other problem (like randomized, weighted sort for example)? If so, which problem?
All of those are just questions about "what" I intend to write, after I've ostensibly already chosen what to write about using my expert knowledge and opinions. "What" questions aren't the only unknowns which are improved in the face of knowing your audience though. For the content to land successfully you need to know something about who's reading it. Should you use Python/F#/C/Zig/curl-braces-pseudocode/python-pseudocode/JS/... to deliver the examples? Is it worth incorporating the resulting assembly into the article? If targetting programmers, do they have enough of a math background that you can or should include a derivation or two? Is this the sort of audience who would appreciate seeing all the tricks and solutions which _don't_ work?
And so on. Analytics are a powerful tool for ensuring your article will actually be useful to somebody, even predicated on your assumption that the best content is written by passionate experts (a statement I largely agree with) -- and the hidden, implicit assumption that somebody informing their writing decisions with analytics is _not_ acting as a passionate expert for the resulting work (a statement I wholeheartedly disagree with).
Diving slightly into that point of disagreement, my niche isn't logarithm approximations; it's using a wealth of math, old-school ML, and low-level CPU knowledge to push computers well past their ordinary limits. I don't have near enough time to write. When I do find time, what should I write about? I'm a passionate expert about a lot of things if our yardstick is the length of a blog post, and I don't have time to write about all of them. If I were to write that logarithm article in today's world I might instead write its dual, fast approximate softmax, signalling some sort of expertise to the "AI" people. Or not. Unless I know who's reading my stuff I only have the vaguest of inklings about the specific topics people might find interesting.
In my mind at least, that choice isn't pandering in the same way as the least-common-denominator drivel being shovel-fed on LinkedIn. I still have my own unique ideas and unique takes on those ideas. You can imagine a Venn diagram of the things I'd like to write about and the things the hive mind wants to consume. I'm definitely biased in that I'll pander to the intersection of those two things, but I think your complaint is about people who exit their own bubble completely.
When someone does it for the audience I always consider it more of a publication. Maybe that just semantics, but that's been the distinction for me.
I still see high traffic on a post explaining oddities in some of Route53's unintuitive behaviors and hope I'm making someone's day a little better in giving them a solution.
That drives me to write more.
I’m more on the side of the author. I write to get my own ideas out of my head. I don’t even publish them, not yet anyways. But if I ever do, I also won’t use analytics. I fear it would somehow bias me into writing for bigger numbers, and I don’t want to do that.
It’s hard to engage in good-faith discussions because individuals may not have thought about the “why” yet, and it would be an embarrassing moment to be caught mid-discussion.
You get visited page, time of visit and a minimal user identifier (preferred locale/user agent, source IP). That should provide enough data for those questions. If you want to make it slightly more privacy friendly and cheaper only store aggregate data (visited page counts etc).
The problem here is probably that logs are not always accessible (managed services like GitHub/GitLab pages).
It's not very difficult, but isn't not effort-less. Start with something like https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess/blob/master/config/brow... which captures 99% of the crawlers out there. Then, when you notice there is one particular user-agent/IP/IP-range doing a bunch of requests, add it to list and re-run. Doing filtering based on ASNs that you see are being used for crawling lets you filter most of the AI agents too.
We've been dealing with this problem for over 2 decades now, and there are solutions out there that removes almost all of it from your logs.
Lots of precedent on this and it's clear cut.
Again, this is a completely settled matter in the EU, so you can easily look it up if your don't believe me.
You don’t need to track users to get this insight, you can get all that insight from tracking server requests.
You may ask what’s the difference. Well, if I track you with in browser tech I can see everything you do.
If I look at the logs I’ll most likely just see a load of people from a single IP at your ISP which is a reverse proxy cache.
I’m fine with that. I don’t run any tracking, but I do look at logs now and again.
hell, theres ready to use log collectors that will give u even nice dashboarding capabilities if you want to provide more fancy offerings in analytics. if ppl like that so much isnt it an easy sell? non invasive analytics?
(should be noted some platforms do this ofc.. :) )
To be clear, my ego would love to know that people are flocking to read my brilliant prose! Alas, though, I don't even have what we used to call analytics: a number of visitors counter.
So my blog is, as someone on HN pointed out to me, "useless".
Do you "need" to have any of the analytics crap to have the same effect? No.
I've set it up on my blog a while ago (https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2023/using-goatcounter-for-blo...) and it's been working really well.
The reason is: a) I do these things first and foremost for myself and I share them because maybe they are useful for other people (but I dont mind if they are not). And b) I always intend to publish my "products" without needing a cookie banner.
And it also gives me a lot of peace of mind.
Put another way, how would my behavior change in response to analytics data? It wouldn't. It certainly shouldn't.
It's nice to know whether people use your stuff or not. Particularly so you don't turn off something that actually do care about.
IMO you lose a bit of authenticity when you start pandering to your audience to boost your numbers, which seems like a silly thing to do for a personal blog.
I'm totally fine with people who usually write about tech and suddenly write about baking, it makes life in my RSS reader that much more fun. If they optimized their "reach" they probably wouldn't include those gems.
:) I recently read something in my tech feed about avant-garde perfumes and it ignited a new interest for me. I used to hate perfumes but now I enjoy them. I’m still going down that fragrant rabbit hole and grateful to have one less thing to dislike in the world.
I used to have Google analytics on the site but then I decided what for - so I removed that.
BTW: This video pushed me over the edge to finally start a homepage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDzAAjzbV5g
2. I use SimpleAnalytics
3. I think Search Console is useful
4. But then, really?
PS: Over the last year, my impression in search more than doubled, my clicks fell 75% #AgeOfAI
I realize that Google may require you to drain data into Search Console to use it or something, but I'm not sure how the data may be useful for the Search Console functionality.
When making a blog post, how else do you get this feedback? 99% of people click, read it, then move on. Quantifying how many people have read, how long they spent reading, and where they came from, is an essential part of interacting with the digital world. Without it you are flying blind.
I agree with this, less so with the validation part, but receiving feedback from others is lovely, pretty much always! But with that said, this isn't the goal or even intention for a lot of people who publish their written texts on the internet. Sometimes people just want to unload, share some tip, or any of the other countless of motivations people can have.
There is nothing that makes people who hit "Publish" and never look at the analytics do anything less "essential" than people obsessing over the metrics, they just have different motivations and reasons.
Personally, I don't feel the need of quantifying anything about most of the stuff I publish one way or another. For example, I don't really care about the HN upvotes/points. Sure, it's fun that some people are enjoying what I write, but I'm participating for the discussions themselves and to learn something new, both about myself and others. Upvotes don't really give me that, but thoughtful replies really do!
Would you be as happy just saving that file to your hard drive, instead of publishing it online?
Maybe some people get motivated or improve content by knowing what gets actually clicked. There is a huge difference between reading web server logs and adding third party services to the websites that track everything.
It’s like if a shop is doing inventory and knows which product is bought how often. There’s no information for the visitor to volunteer, because every visitor should know that the shop/webserver knows when a visitor visits.
> The other reason you might put analytics on your site is to know when someone links to your writing. Again, if the linker doesn’t intend to tell you, then you’re surveilling. You do not need to know every time your writing is mentioned.
Assuming this is done with the referrer header, I also don’t see how this is bad. That’s the whole point of the thing, if you don’t want that as a user, disable it in your browser.
The refer(r)er header is a relic from a distant past when the internet was a very different beast, and when people had very different concerns.
Seems to just be one more link in the kooky "everyone is out to get me" chain of thought.
If only there were a way for readers to post questions or comments back to the authors of blog posts, there could be feedback without the indirection of analytics. Too bad no one has, in the history of (either standard- or micro-) blogging thought to provide such a mechanism.
If you look at analytics or the internet or military-born technologies as applied to people in capitalism, you are but cattle to be utilized for your full value. In that way you can easily be mathematically whittled down to a statistic. More importantly so that these technologies are a way to control cattle in their currently applied capitalistic state. A tool of capitalism in brief.
As tools of capitalism, analytics are needed if you're trying to run a business. I believe the popularity of analytics on blogs is a conflation between old ideas (guest books/visitor counters) and an effort to make your blog a passive income earner. Analytics allow you to turn your site into a business which you optimize for your visitors. However this totally shifts a website owner's focus from hobby and interest sharing to blog post output optimization.
But the current state is that society values any increase in income as smart and savvy. Even if the entire indie web shuts down analytics, what about the people stuck on Facebook (et al), TikTok, and Twitter being subsumed by analytics? Someone will build a new "cool place" to hang out that will be the next cutting edge marketing platform for media culture, entertainment, etc. I'm not entirely convinced this change will snip at the root in a meaningful way.
[0] https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/swords-into-plowshare...
(btw that quote and blog post is very beautiful explanation of the root)
I wrote that plugin and the backend service. That wasn’t my original idea. It started as something else: a plugin for adding your blog to a traffic ranking site called Blogs of the Day. It didn’t focus on analytics for bloggers, it published lists of blogs ranked by traffic. It was meant to help readers find interesting blogs. It was good until it got gamed by low-quality content with iframes and scripts. Automattic bought it and hired me and then I wrote the Stats plugin.
I agree with the author. But this is just an attitude about personal publishing, not a fact. It’s also fine to hold the opposite attitude and to seek validation through data, and even to adapt oneself accordingly.
There is a hierarchy of informative audience reactions to a blog. A page view is an extremely weak signal carrying very little information. Likes and other emoji reactions are slightly more informative. Comments are even more. If you aren’t getting comments and likes on your personal blog, maybe the page views are enough validation for you.
I don’t know, I just don’t care for my own personal blogging anymore. When I did, I was probably seeking human connection out of loneliness. Before blog analytics existed, I made friends through blog comments.
Analytics didn’t result in social connections but it did tickle the reward function. That’s why it exists.
I also don't need a post to tell me what I or my blog needs.
[I gotta stop engaging on low-bar content.]
I'm in the process of trying to monetize a concept I discussed in one of my blog posts. I wouldn't have realized the idea was valuable, or that other people didn't find it obvious, if not for analytics.
I will agree with the general sentiment of the post: that there is a moral duty not to surveil readers of your blog. Personally, I find https://www.goatcounter.com/ strikes the right balance.
The maturity to shrug off this need for validation reaches some faster than others. I broadly agree that GA-level stats aren't helpful, but also if you're going into writing, having feedback mechanisms can help, even if it's just a hit of dopamine when you boastfully weather Digg and /. at the same time.
But I haven't found any analytics tools that strike the right balance; they either are too unwieldy, or they're absurdly simplistic.
These days, going viral is very much a double-edged sword, and getting a heads up is useful in more ways than one.
[0] - https://tinylytics.app/
As for technology stripping us of our humanity, I could not agree less. I think it’s helped us connect better with each other across different countries and cultures, broadening what was for many a fairly narrow view of the world. Technologies like computers and the Internet are also amazing tools for aiding humanity in our creativity and exploration of everything.
And as for the constraints they may place upon you it’s no different then government, economy or religion. They are all constructs designed to control you. Best you can do is realize that and live with it as best you can. That or go hermit I suppose, it’s a valid choice.
So if you have a blog in the hope of getting a lot of traffic, well good luck.
The only reason I see to keep writing a blog in 2025 is to build your portfolio, which may be beneficial when looking for a job.
I can corelate my rushed writing and writing that I took enough time with, using analytics. There are so many things for which analytics are useful for. A lot of them doesnt have anything to do with tracking and doing surveillance on users. It is mostly for giving you a signal and direction on the things you write etc.
And I use GoatCounter analytics specifically cos it is client side and doesn't collect PII. It can be turned off by folks. Server logs doesn't give any option to users so I don't use them.
https://www.unsungnovelty.org/about/#privacy
Some sort of "is this resonating with people" signal is I think useful.
Same reason I look at votes on my old comments. If something gets heavily downvoted then it's probably worth relooking at the comment and trying to figure out why. Maybe my comment was just crap. Maybe it was good but just too contrarian for the audience. Maybe it was ambiguous. Either way there is usually something to be learned from strong signals - both upvotes and down.
There is probably a tendency to overengineer this though. Chances are the default analytics page on your CDN provider is entirely adequate for above basic signal.
The web is now overrun and now full of rampant AI agents, bots and crawlers anyway so analytics are more likely going to be fake.
Especially for a blog where nobody is going to visit it except for bots.
This is probably the only time for the author that humans will visit his blog, but author wouldn't want to know that anyway.
After 20+ years, I have gotten rid of all analytics, comments, SEO-thang, etc. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
EDIT: It does have the analytics by Cloudflare. My personal website is reporting 30.91K Unique visitors last 30-days. If I include the ones I have separated and earmarked as documentations, archives of old Knowledge Base, etc. in total says 1.05M Pageviews while serving up over 107GB of bandwidth in the last 30 days. Beware, this is Cloudflare and I'm not privy to their details. I'm also going to assume a lot of them are bots these days.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mint_(web_analytics_software)
I have some basic analytics on my blog as well. I’m just curious “what’s going on” on my website, in the same way as e.g. a shop owner in real life is aware of what’s going in their store. Publishing things on the internet can feel quite anonymous for the most part anyways, so at least I find it nice to have some rough insight into basic traffic patterns.
[1] - https://github.com/eldy/AWStats
[2] - https://www.nltechno.com/awstats/awstats.pl?config=destaille...
[3] - https://www.awstats.org/