Something Happened Last Week.

There's a concept in economics, that money is like a language. It's a way for people to communicate information without actually speaking the same verbal language. It's data. If I want something, and am willing to pay lots of money for it, it signals that the thing is valuable. If another thing is cheap, it signals that the thing is abundant, or perhaps not worth much money.

I forget which economics book it is, but there's a story about a copper mine in one country that has an explosion or something like that, so they can't mine copper. Then all the way on the other side of the world, copper prices shoot up. Though the person buying copper on the opposite end of the planet has no idea what happened in the copper mine, they receive the information, via money, that copper has suddenly become harder to get.

That's a long-winded, roundabout way to talk about something interesting that happened on one of my sites this week.

I was checking some stats, and the ad revenue was up about 30% yesterday, which was weird. Traffic had gone through the roof. Also weird. I didn't know what happened, but I knew that something had happened.

Was is an algorithm update?

Did something go viral on social media?

So I hopped onto Google Analytics, isolated traffic for the past two days, and checked my top post. Oh, it was that thing I wrote about Ukraine in 2020.

Ukraine is in the news this week obviously, and I hadn't put it together that my blog posts about Ukraine would be getting more traffic at this time.

What I think is interesting about this is that if I hadn't seen the news, and if I didn't have access to social media, I would still know something was going on in Ukraine just because of the traffic data from my website!

Also, this is a great lesson to anyone who is wondering if their efforts blogging are worth the time. This post that is suddenly getting traffic was written TWO years ago. Everything you write is on the internet forever, which is a very cool thing about blogging. You may not see the results of your work right now, but if you're in the game long enough, eventually success will catch up to you.