The stat that broke my brain came from a blog with 12 readers

I was down a rabbit hole about abandoned blogs last Tuesday and found this one person's site about old gas station maps. They had a chart showing that in 1965 there were over 200,000 full service stations in the US. Now it's like 15,000. That's a 92% drop and I still can't wrap my head around it. But here's the thing, the blogger barely posted, maybe once a month, and yet their research was deeper than anything I saw on big car history sites. So does a tiny audience mean the work is less valuable, or does it actually free people up to be more honest? I keep going back and forth on whether we should push people to grow their blogs or just let them stay small. Anyone else find a random stat like that and start questioning the whole point of having readers at all?

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1 Comment

michael88017d ago

Man, that hit me right in the gut. My buddy Dave runs a tiny blog about old fishing lures, maybe 20 readers on a good week. Last year he dug up this old 1950s catalog showing how they painted the lures by hand, like every single one. Big fishing sites just had blurbs, but Dave had photos of the actual paint mixing ratios. He told me he quit trying to grow the blog after a while, said it felt weird getting praise from strangers. Now he just posts for himself, and honestly his stuff got even better. Crazy how the pressure to be big can wreck the very thing that makes it good.