Thursday, May 10, 2012

100,000+ pageviews for a Kerouac-obsessed blog

Some time in the last day or so, The Daily Beat topped 100,000 pageviews since inception (it's currently at 101,223).

I am feeling the need to celebrate. While there may be exceptions, blogs exist to be visited and, more importantly, read. But you can't read one unless you visit, right? So, pageviews correlate with readership.

Pageviews have surged of late. We frequently top 300 per day, and often much more than that (over 786 yesterday). I attribute this surge to my increased usage of Twitter and networking there, but I also think it's related to the buzz about the On The Road film that is debuting this month at Cannes and in the late fall in the U.S. More and more people are searching for Kerouac on-line, and this is the one Kerouac-obsessed blog that I know exists. If there are others, I'd love to know about them. Other blogs have Kerouac in their name, but they don't focus on Kerouac virtually in every post. (Note: I know there's a Kerouac website, DHARMA beat.)

Interestingly, if you search Google blogs for "Kerouac," The Daily Beat doesn't appear until the second page. I could use some help figuring out how to do better with that (as long as it doesn't cost money - after all, this is an avocation only).

I know. Some blogs get 100,000 pageviews a day. Or an hour. But for an avocation with a budget of zero and staff of one, amassing 100,000 pageviews since 2008 seems like a pretty good number. And, as I said, a good bit of that number has occurred in the past few months.

It will be interesting to see what happens once the movie starts getting reviewed.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations! Keep doing great things. This website is also a great resource.

Anonymous said...

Again, great website devoted to all things Jack Kerouac. Like you, I’m patiently awaiting the release of On the Road. Also, I wanted to pass along something I found on Amazon the other day. I had just pre-ordered the expanded edition of Lew Welch's Collected Poems (I highly recommend his poetry) and stumbled across this: Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems: http://www.amazon.com/Jack-Kerouac-Collected-Poems/dp/1598531948/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_5. Didn't know if you were aware, but this is something I need to have/read...816 pages!

Baltimore Colts fan said...

Congrats! I still insist that this blog continues to show steady improvement and yes, even though most every posts mentions Kerouac, there are a lot of interesting "peripheral" insights and revelations that I look forward to reading and thinking about.

There's a Dylan "blog" (if that's what you want to call it) out there that's highly regarded even though it's simply a compilation of news links that amount to nothing much more than the playing-up of mere Hype -- it just doesn't have any real "depth" to it.

Your blog is much richer (and more interesting) than that, and you should be glad about that, as I am!

Rick Dale, author of The Beat Handbook said...

Thanks, jmahler and Baltimore Colts fan! It's great to know you're out their and appreciating The Daily Beat! I'll have to check out that collected poems edition.