The New Hotness

Another year of being the Domain Expert of scam-by-mail gadgets, obsolete ABS codes, and water heater anode rods:

Plotting the log of page views against posts in descending order of popularity gives a power-law relationship of some sort:

The log-log view has odd discontinuities:

Overall page views are down 30% from last year: 205k vs 290k.

WordPress served 1 million ads (vs 1.2 million in 2018) on those 205k page views, nearly five ads per page view, which seems horrifying. If you’re not using an ad blocker, you surely have difficulty finding the blog post amid all the crap.

The implosion of on-line advertising continues apace, however, as WordPress paid only 63% as much per ad: $0.40 (vs $0.70 in 2018) per thousand views. Obviously, ads on WordPress blogs aren’t worth much these days.

Recommendations:

• Set up PiHole on a Raspberry Pi to cut the clutter from all devices on your home network
• Install both Ublock Origin (not Ublock nor Adblock) and Privacy Badger on all your Firefox installations
• Stop using Chrome / Chromium

While I could pay WordPress their upgrade ransom to eliminate the ads, it’s better if you defend yourself by eliminating all ads, wherever they may be.