[maddening]

Personally, I think giving numbers (like 0-12k/month in 7 months) is useless if it is not put in some context.

Several times I googled what should be expected amount of visits to see if I am doing ok or not. Result? It is kinda disheartening to see that after pouring a lot of love, getting rather nice feedback about articles etc, you see that you are getting e.g. 2k visits a month, while someone states that is "should be about 1k visits... a day". And you put some effort into marketing your content!

Thing is, if you look at the amount of searches of the topics you cover, you might find that the person who posted such advice caters to 20x as large audience as you, so that 2k/month might be a really good result! But to see that, you have to put the numbers in some context instead of looking at the absolute numbers. If we applied this to e.g. youtubers we could conclude, that random gameplay streamer does a several times better job than a science channel author.

[freehunter]

100% agree. I run a network of very focused blogs with small but targeted audiences. Each blog may only have 3,000 views per month, but it's serving a city with 10,000 people, so we've captured 1/3 of the market for the entire city. And everyone who views the site is local. But I still hear companies balking at our advertising rates complaining that the CPM (cost per thousand views) is way too high.

At the average $2.80 CPM, we'd make $9 per month. In a city of 10,000 people, what would get more attention: a cheap Google ad, or your name sitting at the top of the only digital media outlet in the city? That's worth a $10 CPM, I think.

It's about the percentage of the market captured, not raw view numbers.

[mockingbirdy]

Try keyword research tools like https://kwfinder.com and others to get a feeling for the search volume and competition for a specific keyword.