analytics and me

I recently tagged Google Analytics to one of my blogs, your family games (YFG).

BIG mistake.

Anything that causes you to question exactly why your writing is a big mistake. Or maybe it's not. Realizing things about yourself isn't a horrible thing. It's helpful to the personality and how you live, just hurtful to the ego.

Okay, time to clarify.

Last April, I purchased the domain name yourfamilygames.com with the hopes of starting a website that would serve as an online resource for parents to learn about their child's hobby of videogames. There's been too much of a mess in the media about how games are violent and playing Grand Theft Auto will turn everyone into a feral mass murderer. As a gamer, I know other people who play games and they come from all demographics. Almost all of them play M-rated titles and are awesome human beings. When a child picks up a game with questionable content, their parent needs to be aware of it, so they can talk about it and the child understands what in the game is socially acceptable and what isn't. I'm not promoting violent games, I'm trying to say their not as harmful and horrible as anti-videogame activists claim. I truly believe in this cause.

Then I decided I'd track the traffic of my blog by using a service from IceRocket. It's a nifty little add-on. The tracker tallies all the hits and visits I get and breaks them down by search terms, country, IP address, even browser and screen resolution. When I update the site I typically garnered a few hits a day and that made me happy.

But recently, YFg and me have been in a slump. I had just written tons of holiday buying suggestions that occupied the hours before and after I ran off to work at UPS. I couldn't figure out what to write next. I hadn't been happy with the reviews I was writing lately. I was burnt out from guides (but if I had pushed laziness aside I probably could have churned something else out). There were other projects I had put on the backburner that were glaring at me with frothing disgust.

And then I did it. On a whim one morning, I copied and pasted the Google Analytics code into my website.

A couple days later, I decided to crack open Analytics for the first time and see how it worked. I love playing with new toys, so I was pretty excited. Analytics had recorded hits from the past few days, among other data. But there was one fateful link that really changed everything. The statistic that showed you how much time people had spent at your blog before leaving. Interested and amused Google collected such datum, I clicked it.

I knew the results weren't going to be pretty, but I wasn't prepared to see that 70% of my visitors didn't linger any longer than 10 seconds. 10 measly seconds. That's an official NASA blast-off countdown. That's how long it takes to nuke stuff in my new microwave's highest setting. That's not long at all.

It was really disappointing to see that no one reads the blog I had put so much time into.

Then a thought dawned on me. Of course, it was an idea we had discussed in my yoga teacher training class. Was I writing for the noble cause I mentioned earlier, or was I writing for attention, for me? Did I really care about family videogaming or did I just want random strangers on the Internet to give me some love? I hate to admit it, but I think the last few weeks it's been for the latter reason.

So I've decided. That kind of thinking just won't do. Writing informatively shouldn't be for yourself. It should be for others--for the truth. In this mad world we live in, the truth is very important and oftentimes lost or not even pursued. The truth is something to be shared simplistically, not to be used as a mere springboard for attention (but if you hit a big enough truth that's bound to happen).

Now, most of the writings on YFG are opinion, and that being said, they cannot be the absolute authority on gaming (in fact, I laugh at that idea; reading your gaming news from one source isn't too different from reading political news from one source).

Still, it's interesting that something as simple as lines of code for a hit counter can make you rethink and reevaluate yourself as a writer and a person. It's like everything else in my life--I tend to think too much about things.

And now that I'm done writing about this small experience of mine, I'm going to try to take all of this lofty talk about the "truth" and put it to use.

namaste and congrats if you read this whole thing *gives cookie*