Views Measure Views

Nine years after starting, the author finally realized the need for a different metric to measure their success. A fellow writer on DEV, Sylwia Laskowska, recently shared her impressive numbers, boasting hundreds of thousands of views and tens of thousands of followers. The author, who has been on the platform for more than nine years, currently stands at 48,408 total views.

However, the author urges against comparing themselves to others, as building a large readership is challenging and takes a significant amount of time.

The author emphasizes that gaining a large number of followers does not necessarily mean having a loyal audience. Using their own data, they discovered that between October and mid-September, their follower count increased by nearly 3,000, while their total views only rose by a mere 1,634. This discrepancy led the author to investigate further, pulling nine years of data from the DEV API to create a chart of follower growth with publication dates marked.

The chart proved useless, revealing that the growth was not due to the author's writing but rather the result of reciprocal-follow farming, an endemic issue in the platform.

The author emphasizes that a single page view is a genuine measure of engagement, as it indicates that someone loaded the page. While some may label this as a vanity metric, meaning it is meaningless, the author argues that it is not. However, they warn against conflating page views with success. Success can be measured by the article's downstream behavior, such as the reader taking action or engaging further with the author's work.

The author also highlights the importance of considering the distribution of an article's reach. A widely useful JavaScript tutorial and an article about authority boundaries in AI-generated software may have different potential readerships. The author stresses that audience size is a property of both the artifact and the market surrounding it. Personal writing, like any other form of content, has its own funnel, which may be less linear than corporate content, but it still has a purpose.

In conclusion, the author advocates for evaluating the quality, audience fit, and distribution of an article separately. While writing quality, relevance, and discovery are crucial, the author emphasizes that these factors are distinct and cannot be interchanged. Vanity metrics, such as page views, have their place but should not be mistaken for the entire story or the ultimate measure of success.