I want to add my two cents to this because I'm not trying to monetize what I am doing; No disrespect intended. I've come around and I'm not as rabid against the topic as I once was.
I really want to stress that I feel the number game is to me a small part of the story. I'm trying to represent this space in time on video. I'm not a "professional". What am doing is more of a essay kind of experience. I'm just trying to express a non-fiction narrative story using text, photos and video. Sorry in advanced for being long winded. My current stats as I understand them from Blip: 194 Blip Video Posts with 44,236 views and 11 Blip Comments. I know that some video pirates/aggregators are stealing/displaying my content w/o my consent so the numbers are higher. 394 Blogger Posts with a total of 25,000 views with 39,000 page views. The daily average is 87 people. The number is a little low because I lost my Site Meeter feed for a while without knowing it. I selected the videos that seemed to doing well or represented my work and put them in the sidebar. The Nikki Giovanni videos started out real slow, maybe 1 or 2 views a week. I was very disappointed, no real action for more than a year. Dr. Giovanni has a deep connection with many African-American women so by word of mouth/searching has steadily increased the views. They are now my all time popular videos at about a 1,000 1,500 views. If the audience that want what you have to say finds you we have to let go of when they do. We are not TV in that respect, our initial numbers are not the final numbers. They do evolve. LA Tofu Festival - Living La Vida Loca was one of the worst shot videos I ever did. It was when my old faithful camcorder was dying and I couldn't replace it. I salvage what I could and posted it thinking nobody is going to watch it. I was wrong by 689 people. Certain art videos do real well and sex and gender issue topics do gain short burst of viewers. I can prove it ;-) The protest videos and the videos about visiting a local Mosque did OK at about 350 each but I hoped they would do better. But I had folks from Arab countries check it out. I have no idea how they found me. It was a slow, steady growth from five people a month, to maybe 6 a day to steady 10, 20, 30 views. It stuck on those numbers for a long time. As I began to do more outreach, speaking, participating in non-vlogging communities like BlogHer the numbers grew. I didn't go to other blogs to plug mine, I like discovering bloggers and concepts. I try to leave a comment each time. Bloggers like comments. I'll tell you, getting selected Blogger Site of the Day will jump your numbers up very quickly, in the thousands. It will kick up your spam level as well. But those folks are gone and I'm returning to normal for me. The videos for the library program students have really low numbers in the 30s(as in 30 people)but as the next wave of students comes in and check them out they will grow. As I do more talks to libraries and librarians it will grow. David Kessler from Shadow Lands does damn beautiful work. In fact, he is giving me a complex at the moment, in a good way. He should have better numbers than me. Shadow Lands will as people talk him up, and he puts the networking into place. Some of you do similar kinds of videos, it is going to take time to find your audiences. They are looking for you as well. So much to say about this, Gena
