It is, as anybody who monitors their performance on the basis of statistics knows, easy to get down when your data does not match your expectations.

Unsurprisingly, traffic on this blog, and on our YouTube channel, was down in July. There is some evidence that this is part of a bigger trend on YouTube, but there can be no doubt that the biggest reason in our case was that I was working at well under capacity because of illness, and it showed.

Our YouTube traffic in July was only around 1.1 million views, when at present something closer to 2 million is more commonplace, and blog traffic was only around 600,000 views, when more than 800,000 has become normal.

However, I then got data on three traffic sources to which I usually give little attention because they have not, until very recently, contributed significantly to our impact. They are from Facebook, LinkedIn and Substack, on all of which I now post regularly.

To my surprise, I have discovered that we now generate around 100,000 views a month on LinkedIn, 90,000 on Facebook (where I only use that platform for work posts), and Substack is growing fast, with around 75,000 views. It's only lower than the others because I didn't post there every day, whereas I do on both Facebook and LinkedIn. I will have to correct that. Together, these now generate more than another 3 million views a year.

It is also interesting to note the biggest contributor to the change in traffic on those three platforms. It is, undoubtedly, the infographics. They will be continuing.

At the same time, given that this is the political silly season and not a lot is going on, I am planning a variation on that infographic theme. We are looking to create video versions as basic introductions to the topics this blog addresses and to expand the available information on heterodox, post-Keynesian, and modern monetary theory-inspired alternatives to mainstream economics. Like the infographics, this will involve some experimentation, but expect something soon.

PDF of article