you know, yesterday this page had 280,000 hits. today, it has 220,000 hits. it's a little confusing.

now, it's not like i really care, to be honest. the only value that number has to me is as a metric of marketing potential. youtube is not a martketplace - there's nothing for sale. it's a place to advertise things. the store is at bandcamp.

i advertise things here, and sell things there. i'd set up a store at google - they're actually not terrible on paying artists, compared to spotify and others - but they require a wallet account, which requires a credit card. their attempt to monopolize the process has locked me out. i can only shrug, because i think i owe visa something like $15,000 (truth is, i haven't looked at the bill in years...). i'm simply not about to call to ask what i owe them, and if they're willing to give me another card.

so, again, i don't really care.

except that it's nice to watch numbers get bigger. it passed 250K back in march. i was expecting it to get to 300K near the beginning of may. now, who knows - it might shrink back to 0....

the only thing i can think of is that maybe some videos were taken down, but then what's the point?

i've also noticed that they've stopped counting hits on the front page which is just like...

how am i supposed to know how many people visited the page - ie. how effective my youtube advertising has been in driving traffic?

i've got metrics at bandcamp, but it only tells half the story. it doesn't tell me how many people i'm able to get from youtube to bandcamp, which is the point.

i know they don't like the idea of having a "featured track". they want a "channel trailer" to "maximize subscribers". but, i don't get paid for subscribers. there's no self interest in telling people to subscribe. and nobody reads their feed, anyways. i lose subscribers when i upload new videos because they're irritated that i send them notifications. but if you're not interested in the music, why the fuck did you subscribe? am i supposed to care? to tread carefully, so that people that don't care don't unsubscribe? it's a dumb system, and they're leaving us with little choice but to break it. computers aren't tvs and surfers aren't viewers...

so, if they think it's going to modify behaviour.....they're not getting it. i'm not putting the stuff up to maximize hits. i'm cycling around links to the store. the basic traffic direction tactic isn't going to change. it's just that now, i don't know how much traffic i'm getting....

it would be easiest to just put it back the way it was. but, if that's not acceptable for whatever reason, it would be great to get a "channel visits" metric - that is, a metric that documents how many people visit the channel, even if it's just to watch the trailer. that number is far more useful to me than a subscriber count, or watching the hits on my videos increase.