Over the years, I have occasionally wondered, how much time I have taken up in people’s lives with them looking through my blog content, and if that time had been well used or wasted? Or more likely, what amounts or proportion of time I have taken up of each as I’m sure there’d be lots of people who would tell me they got something they deemed worth their time on my blog, and also lots of people who would also tell me they regretted wasting the most valuable asset they had in life, which is time, on my blog.

Once upon a time, WordPress briefly showed in their stats how long the average visitor spent on one’s blog, for each day, week, month, and even year, which are how one can aggregate one’s blog stats on the platform. During that time, most of the time I looked at it showed between 1 to 2 minutes, which actually matched quite well to average number of posts viewed. To be on the safe side, and possibly not to scare me so much, I will take an average of 1 full minute per post view. I know many won’t have reached this, but I’m betting the average is actually more from the detailed posts that have had not only lots of views, but downloads, and activities with those downloads that would be far more than one minute. But let’s say it’s 1 minute per view for the sake of simplicity.

After 12 years of blogging now, and 19.17 million views, that’d be 19.17M minutes people will have spent on my blog! Oi!!! I’m saying that without even knowing what 19.17M minutes means cause it’s such a big number!

Calming down and doing the math, that is 13,313 days, which is 36.5 years!!!

36.5 years??? I have taken up 36.5 years of people’s lives??? OMFG!!!

Oh, my conscience is trembling… and telling me “you had better hope most of them found something useful here, or at least worthwhile of their time because you wouldn’t want that on your conscience if you had wasted that much of people’s time!”

Yes. Yes. Yes. I hope most people found stuff here they deemed worthwhile of their time. My apologies if you didn’t but I guess that’s a bit meaningless since it’s not like I can do anything about it, and it’s not like it’d be the first place anybody hasn’t found what they were looking for online when they went there for whatever reason, like maybe Google directed them to it. Actually, maybe get upset at Google if you didn’t find something useful here. The vast majority of people find my blog that way, unlike many others who have a big dedicated following.

I wonder how much time Google (the search engine) has wasted in people’s lives leading them astray or to less than satisfactory destinations. Of course, Google can’t fulfill a lot of those requests. It wouldn’t be realistic of expecting them to ever to, either. But I wonder where the search engine hadn’t done well for reasons that are on it rather than on the user, like less than optimal classification of information, or biased classification of information in the name of promotion, and end up wasting people’s time, I wonder if Google, the company and staff, have thought about how much time they’ve wasted in people’s lives?

It’d be a minor setback for all the good they have done to help people save time, or just find information, or suggest something the people didn’t know about that has had positive impact on people’s lives, but it’s still a reality of time lived lost.

I wonder how much that would be, and if Google had ever thought about it.

 

 

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