WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? [537]

I will start with the facts. As of 8.03am BST on Friday 17^th April 2026, this website, www.leighspence.net, has had one million page views since it went live at midday BST on Saturday 1^st May 2021. Thank you for being one of those viewers. I have never added a page counter to this website, as I think people stopped doing that when GeoCities closed in 2009.

This website was originally found at www.dancingwiththegatekeepers.com from 30th May 2016 – yes, I will be doing something to mark a decade since then – and I regret having not used my name from the start. Before the 2021 switch, I had amassed over 185,000 views, but despite the usual promotion on social media, including reposting new links for everything I had done to that point, it took until July 2016 for the new site to achieve one thousand views. 

Fortunately, the momentum reappeared, feelings about starting from scratch being replaced by the safety of having over three hundred articles already available: ten thousand views were reached by September 2021, and twenty-five thousand by the end of the year. Growth was steady, taking until August 2023 to reach one hundred thousand views, but it only took one more year to double that, and only until May 2025 to double that again to four hundred thousand views. 

This means that www.leighspence.net has been visited over six hundred thousand times in the last year...

This is why I am sceptical about page views for websites: it is not from seeing counters on the sites that do have them, or from media reports about other sites, or claims made to attract advertising, but from having seen the data about my own work, for it appears to be thriving to the extent of having taken on a life of its own.

I can only guess that having written about so many different subjects over nearly ten years means that work will appear in search engine results – the main driver of traffic to the website is Google, followed by itself via links from other sites, with social media in third place. Although I will continue to use social media to promote my work, it may be that I am in a good place to survive any eventual decline in the general use of social media, as people move on to other things – it may be a good opportunity to resurrect GeoCities.

I still have my suspicions about A.I. robots scraping my writing, much as anyone who has created anything and put it on the internet will do, despite all the attempts you have made to mitigate or prevent this. However, it this is simply an evolution of how people are searching for information, no matter my misgivings on checking the veracity of what they are being told, then I am glad to be considered a reliable online presence.

The conclusion I should reach from here is accept the figures, instead of being bemused by them, and don’t question why the numbers are so high. I should take it as a sign that I must be doing something right... and if you’ve read this far, I probably have.

Thanks to all of you again.