Blog shrinkage?

Two years ago, in the month of June 2005 I had 2,863 visits to this blog, about 100 a day. This week I had an average of 2,816 visits per day. And that is slightly down from just over 3,000 visits per day in March 2007. Growth from 2003, when I started my blog to now was phenomenal, but uneven. I had lots of phases with stable readership over a couple of months, and then spurts of growth over a couple of months. The last of these growth spurts was from 1,000 visits per day in September 2006 to the 3,000 visits per day in March 2007.

Now I'm tempted to speculate that the fact that growth has stopped is related to the fact that I stopped playing World of Warcraft, and am writing less about that game. But then I can't explain why that last growth spurt started only in September of last year, I've been blogging about WoW since end of 2004. And those posts I still write about WoW still get lots of hits from sites like WoWInsider or other MMO "news" sites.

I am not really worried that my blog is currently not growing in readership, or might even shrink a bit. I still don't have any advertising on my site, so while I take a certain natural pride in the number of hits I get, I don't derive any income from it. And I know that next month, July 2007 will probably be pretty horrible for my reader numbers, with maybe even some long-term decline caused: I will spend 3 weeks of summer holidays on an island, without taking my computer. That *might* cause 3 weeks of total silence on this blog, or if I manage to find some internet café some infrequent posts on hopefully rare rainy days. The advantage of not growing that fast any more is that it alleviates my fears that I hit some sort of traffic or bandwith restriction, because I'm using a free blogging service which probably doesn't allow unlimited bandwith.

Both me writing less about WoW, and possibly not writing at all during my summer holidays reflects the fact that I'm not wrapping the rest of my life around the blog. The blog is part of my life, but it is supposed to observe and record what I do, not to determine what I do or don't do.