[HuwFulcher]

How horrifying that someone who does writing potentially as their income would seek to protect that revenue stream.

Services like Plausible give you the bare minimum to understand what is viewed most. If you have a website that you want people to visit then it’s a pretty basic requirement that you’ll want to see what people are interested in.

When you start “personalising” the experience based on some tracking that’s when it becomes a problem.

[peoplefromibiza]

> a pretty basic requirement that you’ll want to see what people are interested in.

not really

it should be what you are competent and proficient at

people will come because they like what you do, not because you do the things they like (sounds like the same thing, but it isn't)

there are many proxies to know what they like if you want to plan what to publish and when and for how long, website visits are one of the less interesting.

a lot of websites such as this one get a lot of visits that drive no revenue at all.

OTOH there are websites who receive a small amount of visits, but make revenues based on the amount of people subscribing to the content (the textbook example is OF, people there can get from a handful of subscriber what others earn from hundreds of thousands of views on YT or the like)

so basically monitoring your revenues works better than constantly optimizing for views, in the latter case you are optimizing for the wrong thing

I know a lot of people who sell online that do not use analytics at all, except for coarse grained ones like number of subscriptions/number of items sold/how many email they receive about something they published or messages from social platforms etc.

that's been true in my experience through almost 30 years of interacting and helping publishing creative content online and offline (books, records, etc)

[HuwFulcher]

> people will come because they like what you do, not because you do the things they like (sounds like the same thing, but it isn't)

This isn’t true for all channels. The current state of search requires you to adapt your content to what people are looking for. Social channels are as you’ve said.

It doesn’t matter how you want to slice it. Understanding how many people are coming to your website, from where and what they’re looking at is valuable.

I agree the “end metric” is whatever actually drives the revenue. But number of people coming to a website can help tune that.

[cpill]

emails revived or messages on social media are just another analytic and filling that same need as knowing pages hits. and somehow these people are vega analytics junkies instead of mainlining page hits. your unconvincing in the argument for "analytics are not needed"

[peoplefromibiza]

they are not collected without user consent or knowledge though.

you chose to send an email or to buy a product or a subscription, which is different from being tracked.

it's still a metric, but has an higher value.

it's people genuinely interested in what you offer.