Perhaps you can help resolve this mystery.
It started on 4 July. The number of reads on my site jumped five-fold. This continued through the next two days. Why, I wondered? Usually when this happens, it’s one person or a couple of people liking what they’ve found and reading around the site. Not this time. Each visitor read, on average, 1.03 articles. They were from 43 different countries, so it didn’t look like a network of friends who’d found my site. The top three countries were Brazil, the US, and India.
I put on my deer-stalker and settled-in for a three pipe problem.
These readers are interested in fiction, not non-fiction. With one or two exceptions (which are probably unrelated to this wave), the reads were the 100-short stories I post, rather than the literary commentaries. And the coverage of stories was not random: almost all were from a distinct three-year period One tale, in particular, stood out: Legend.
Perhaps it was because his parents called him Darius. Bearing the name of an ancient conqueror carries its own risks. At all events, Darry played a long game only he understood.
“Who does it harm?” he’d say when we questioned his project. For 25 years he quarried and shaped, assembled and carved. In secret, he overwrote the landscape of his extensive estates with temples and amphitheatres, statuary and canals.
“Darry,” I said to him one day, “this is a Disneyworld, a fantasy.”
“Now.” He nodded. “Sure. But in a thousand years, who’ll be certain?”
Darius was inventing a legend.
This story received almost the same number of reads as the combination of the next three most frequently hit stories. However, no story received a sufficient number of hits to be identified as a “landing page” from some referrer.
In all, between 4 July and 7 July, there 504 new reads (excluding those who don’t appear to be part of this group). Between them, they read 97 stories, all of them published between 13 April 2016 and 6 November 2019. The one story published later than this may not have been due to this group. These 97 stories comprised around half the stories I published over these three and a half years. But they only accounted for around a fifth of all the stories on the site,
A referrer does still seem the most likely explanation for this spike in reads. If someone with a considerable number of followers posted a reference to my site (though not to any particular story), this would partially explain the phenomenon. It would not, however, explain the distinct time focus of the reads. My own blog analysis tools offered no help in identifying possible referrers. I tried a Google search, but found no reference to my site from an internet celebrity.
Probably coincidentally, this strange new phenomenon has reversed a trend over the past three months of falling readership. I say coincidentally because I know what’s caused that fall: a decline in following of the site that drives most traffic to my site.
Some of you reading this will know the answer. If you’ve been attracted to my site for the first time recently, please leave me a comment on this article, telling me what it was sent you here. Particularly if you’re from Brazil or India.
Update
Looking in more detail at the referrers, one stands out: ed2go. This is an online provider of adult education (including writing courses), part of the Cengage group. It has made 164 references to my site since the start of the year. It is consistently the fourth most common referrer to my site after search engines, the WordPress reader, and inklinkz, the service that supports Friday Fictioneers.
Neil MacDonald Author 