...but, again, it's sort of meaningless. i watched my current front track (inertia) jump from 210 to 276 in one jump, then from 276 to 301 in ten minutes. under 300, it's real time. it was 100 hits in about a half hour. yet it took three days to catch up in the official tally, indicating i'm getting hundreds and hundreds more hits than are being recorded. i think this is happening because people, in general, aren't blocking the autoplay.
i've been through this before, and i'm not convinced the policy has remained static. it seems to swap back and forth more or less randomly. that's not really the substantial concern. the substantial concern, for me, is simply that the hit counts aren't accurate in measuring REACH, which is what youtube exists for. until youtube changes the way that it understands itself from a content provider to an advertising platform, that accuracy will never exist.
here's an example of the disconnect: while traffic was crashing at youtube (at least officially), it was soaring at bandcamp - which is where the hits actually matter. i hit 500 hits this month, which is the highest total in five years. i also got several sales, for the first time ever. given that 95% of my bandcamp traffic comes from youtube, it doesn't make any sense to think that bandcamp peaked the same time youtube crashed - but it's what the numbers suggest. again, it's not really that the youtube numbers crashed, it's that the metrics aren't even close to being accurate because of the site's policy in how they're being measured.
in the end, i have to conclude that what i'm doing is working. i'm driving traffic to where i want it to be. i'm selling discs - hopefully more soon. it's just that youtube isn't measuring it...
the psychological attachment i previously had into this is dissipated. sure, i'd like to see it keep growing. but i know it doesn't really mean anything...
this curve is far more important, and you can see that nice spike.
i mean, i'll also point out that i don't get to really promoting my first official recordings for another year. these are just introductory demos, where i was teaching myself how to do things. they're not really salable or presentable as anything more than that. so that's lots of time to go through those sorts of growing pains and figure it out.
my first really serious recordings won't enter the promo cycle until 2017.
late 2017...
it's slow, but i knew that was going to be the reality when i picked this and i'm sticking with it.
i'm not expecting it to bell on me. that would be horrific. i'm expecting it to hit a max point and stay flat. i guess there's some evidence that 3000 might be that max point, but there's also some evidence it's still growing.
i've wondered if it might even have something to do with the school schedule. it seemed to peak before midterms and crash during them.
if so, i might notice a yearly pattern work in that is fluctuating upwards. who knows, though, we'll just have to watch and see.
