One Hundred Thousand Views

A thank-you, and two things the numbers taught me.

This site just passed one hundred thousand page views.¹ ¹ Counted by my self-hosted Umami instance, which doesn’t see anyone who blocks it—so the real total is higher. The average visit lasts five and a half minutes, and two thirds of readers leave from the page they landed on. The number itself is vanity, but each count is a person who read something I wrote, often to the end. So, before anything else: thank you.

Two things in the breakdown are worth passing on.

Almost nobody arrives from Google.² ² Every search engine combined—Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Kagi—accounts for under three percent of arrivals. Google by itself barely registers. Nine in ten of you came from Reddit or Hacker News: the front page, not the search index. So the traffic spikes and never accrues—a post lands, it’s read widely for a day, and between spikes the line lies flat.³ ³ Hacker News sends about a third of Reddit’s traffic but reads five times as much per head: eleven views per reader against two. Reddit drove roughly eight thousand views, Hacker News fourteen and a half thousand. The most devoted source of all is isocpp.org, whose readers averaged more than four visits each. I don’t own this audience so much as rent it, one post at a time.

And the posts that travel are not the posts you read.⁴ ⁴ Views per reader tell the story: the lock-free ring buffer earns 8.7, the fundamental theorem of calculus 7.5, devirtualization 7.2, type erasure 3.3—against 1.6 and 1.4 for the two self-hosting posts. The ring-buffer post has the most views on the whole site despite a fraction of the reach. The self-hosting posts win the lottery and are read exactly once, the mark of a drive-by from an aggregator. The deep ones—a lock-free ring buffer, the fundamental theorem of calculus, devirtualization—earn seven to nine views apiece and keep earning them long after the spike has died.⁵ ⁵ The referrer log is full of small delights: the C++ community carried the systems posts on its own (isocpp.org, libhunt, Meeting C++); a whole ecosystem of Hacker News clients and RSS readers I’d never heard of; Chinese aggregators like Zhihu and Weibo; and, for the first time, AI assistants citing pages—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot. My favourites are the entries that shouldn’t exist at all: hits from a phone’s offline cache and from a local /Users/.../index.html path—someone who kept a copy. You come back to the hard posts. Virality evaporates; depth compounds.

So, again: thank you for reading. If you’d like the next post to find you rather than leaving it to the front page, subscribe to the newsletter or follow along by RSS.⁶ ⁶ Both are free and there is no catch. The newsletter is plain text—no tracking, no HTML, just the post—and unsubscribing takes one click. Either way, you become the kind of reader a spike can’t take back.

On to the next hundred thousand.

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Have feedback? Email me at david@alvarezrosa.com.

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