Two Companies Decide Whether Anybody Finds Me

I pulled the referrer log on my own site and finally did the math I had been avoiding.

Every visit this site has ever recorded, sorted by where it came from. Not an estimate. A straight count out of the database that runs the place.

Thirty five thousand three hundred thirty two visits.

Meta sent 9,448 of them. X sent 4,108. Put those two together and you get 13,556 visits, which is 38 percent of everything that has ever landed here.

Two companies. Thirty eight percent of my front door.

The number I actually own is the small one

Look at the internal line. 2,929 visits.

That is one page of my site sending somebody to another page of my site. A reader who finished something and clicked into the next thing. No algorithm in the middle. No feed deciding whether it was worth showing.

8.3 percent.

That is the only column on that chart I built with my own hands, and it is the fourth biggest one.

The 16,356 with no referrer looks like ownership and mostly is not. That bucket is direct visits, bookmarks, app taps, and links where the referrer got stripped on the way through. Some of it is people who typed my name in on purpose. A lot of it is somebody tapping a link inside a messaging app. I cannot tell those apart, so I do not get to claim it as mine.

Google is 2,303. Six and a half percent. Search is not carrying me yet and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Why 38 percent should bother you instead of comfort you

Here is the thing about traffic you did not build.

It does not give notice before it leaves.

If either of those two platforms changes how it treats outbound links next month, that column shrinks and nothing else happens. No email. No appeal. No invoice explaining what changed. You wake up, the number is smaller, and you spend a month guessing at why.

I wrote back in July that you do not own your audience, you are renting it. At the time that was a principle I believed. Now it is a chart with my own name on it.

The fix is boring, and it is mostly internal links

Here is the other number I counted.

220 published articles as of today. 293 internal links between them.

Just over one link per article.

That is embarrassing for a site whose entire argument is that the archive is the product. Every article I publish with no path out of it is a dead end. The reader finishes, feels something, and leaves, and the next thing in front of their eyes is somebody else's feed.

I built the doors and then forgot to connect the rooms.

Three things I am changing this week

One. Every new article gets at least three links to other things on this site, and they get chosen because they are genuinely the next thing to read, not because I needed three links.

Two. Every article gets one clear place to leave an address. An email address is the only piece of this whole system that no platform can take back from me.

Three. I stop reading the platform columns as wins. Nine thousand visits from Meta is not an achievement. It is a number Meta is currently allowing.

None of that is clever. That is sort of the point. The clever version of this problem is chasing a new platform every quarter. The boring version is building somewhere the traffic can land and then stay.

If you do not run a website

You have the same chart. Different business, same chart.

Where do your customers actually come from? If the honest answer is one referral source, one marketplace, one platform, or one guy who keeps sending you work, you have a 38 percent problem too. Yours is probably worse, because a website can survive a bad quarter and a payroll cannot.

Go count it. Write down your last twenty customers and where each one came from. Do not estimate. Write the twenty.

If more than a third trace back to something you do not control, that is your exposure, in writing, for the first time.

Then do the boring version. Get the addresses. Build a path from one customer to the next that does not need a platform standing in the middle taking a cut and a vote.

What I am not going to do

I am not leaving those platforms. That would be dumb. Thirteen thousand visits is thirteen thousand visits and I will take them.

I am just done calling borrowed reach a foundation.

The chart above is my honest position as of today. Two companies decide whether anybody finds me, and the piece I built myself is the smallest bar on the board. That is the gap. Everything I do for the rest of this year is closing it.