Pageviews don’t say much—they’re a signal, at best, that something you wrote is getting attention, but it doesn’t indicate whether it’s getting attention from the people you want.
When I was younger I thought busy people were more important than everyone else. Otherwise why would they be so busy? I had busy bosses, busy parents, and always I just thought they must have really important things to do. It seemed an easy way to see who mattered and who didn’t. The busy must matter more, and the lazy mattered less. This is the cult of busy. That simply by always seeming to have something to do, we all assume you must be important or successful.
When things go wrong and we can’t understand why, it’s often because we’re measuring the wrong stuff. The most successful bloggers generally maintain the sites which garner the most pageviews, but they also maintain the sites which generate the best conversation. If you blog for pageviews, you’ll end up looking like this bozo, seeing the largest possible quantity of readers as a means toward a quick buck. If you blog to participate in the kind of conversations you’re genuinely interested in, you’ll be rewarded with quality readers. Those readers will tell their friends, and eventually you’ll see a spike in pageviews. But you won’t get pageviews if you set out for pageviews.
Similarly, busyness does not equal success. Money doesn’t equal success. True, successful people are often busy and wealthy, but these people are really successful because they’re working on projects they’re passionate about, and know how to make great use of their time. The burqa does not equal the repression of women, even though repressed women might wear the burqa. Islam does not equal “radical Islam”. Christianity does not equal fundamentalism. Productivity does not equal word count or hours spent at the office. Followers don’t equal friends. In a whole number of situations, for a whole number of reasons, we mistakenly see one thing as causing or representing another. We take a symbol for what it claims to represent.
Reminds me of a fantastic Mr. Show sketch: “More Money = Better Than”.