“Oh lord, more rambling about Canada. Go to your happy place. I’m the map! I’m the map! I’M THE MAP!! Take me away, Dora.” (Sarah Kirkconnell photo)
Fear me, Huffington Post, fear me!!
OK, well then, now that I’ve calmed down and come back to reality, it’s highly unlikely that a major web site like HuffPo is ever going to worry about Coupeville Sports chipping away at their page view dominance.
Yet…
But, and this seems like a major milestone — at least to me — in the next day or so, I will click over into 250,000 page views in the short run of my blog.
A quarter million views — half a million eyeballs, if each viewer had both eyes working — of what is essentially a niche project.
And a pretty thin niche at that, since the Welcome to Coupeville sign that sits two-tenths of a mile from “company” headquarters states there’s about 1,800 people residing inside city limits.
Now, it’s possible some of those views came my way inadvertently.
A day does not go by that the internet search term “shower boys” doesn’t kick at least one weirdo my way.
The day I gave in to CHS wild man Brian Norris on his birthday and ran his photo of Wolf baseball and soccer players mugging for the camera in the showers (WEARING TOWELS, I MIGHT ADD!!!!!) was the day I found a new, probably unnecessary, audience.
But, however I got there, a quarter million page views blows me away.
I have no idea what numbers the Canadian corporate rags are pulling in these days, but I am pretty sure more people are reading me now than when I plugged away for the Whidbey Examiner (before their Evil Overlords erased three years worth of my bylined stories).
I rarely, if ever, got any kind of feedback from players, parents or fans in those days, while now it’s a steady two-way street.
A huge part of the success of this blog comes not from any words I type, but from the billions of photos we run.
Jim Waller, the Sports Editor at the Whidbey News-Times, and my high school journalism teacher (he may still be having cold sweat-drenched flashbacks to those days) is doing a strong job for the Canadian rags, writing and shooting.
Since the Examiner is a paper in name only, without a staff of its own, his work also runs there.
But it’s a little unfair at times.
Since the Canadian rags are too cheap (my words, not his) to provide him with a full-time photographer like the olden days, he has to face my Million Mom Army by himself.
Waller is one man, and he has to cover Oak Harbor sports as well (it might look unseemly if a Hall of Fame baseball coach who toiled in the purple and gold for three-plus decades ignored his former stomping grounds), so he can’t be everywhere.
Thanks to Shelli Trumbull, John Fisken, Robert Bishop, Kali Barrio, Amy King, Kerry Rosenkrance, Amy Briscoe and a list of snap-happy photo bugs that goes on for days, I can be everywhere.
Without ever leaving my perch on Penn Cove.
So, the people come for the photos, and, if I’m lucky, they read some of the words as well.
Whatever. It seems to be working.
In the end, I have no idea what 250,000 page views really means.
I might be getting my butt kicked by the Canadian rags. Possible.
With all the money they’re funneling into their Whidbey papers, the corporate hosers in Moose Jaw better be hoping their papers are producing better numbers than I am.
If not, the giant, belching media beast should seriously think about funding me on the side.
I took your loony-encrusted paychecks from ’92-’94 (and cashed them without flinching) and you could draft on my success in ’14 for what it probably costs to buy morning doughnuts for head honcho David Black.
My contact info is readily available, Moosejawians.
If I am, by some weird twist, actually getting better numbers than the sports sections of the “local” papers, well then, maybe you shouldn’t have erased my bylines and ticked me off in the first place, you back-bacon-eatin’ hosers.
Yep, there’s one thing 250,000 page views can’t correct — my willingness to burn all my bridges while I’m still standing on them.
Classic David.
