Musings & Thoughts for Tuesday, April 6, 2021, or: ‘A Certain Point of View, Too’ Celebrates Its One-Year Anniversary

Hello, there, Dear Reader. It’s Tuesday, April 6, 2021, and as I write this it is late morning in New Hometown, Florida. Currently, it is a bit chilly (by Florida standards, at least); the temperature is 56˚F (13˚C) under sunny skies. With a gentle breeze blowing at 1 MPH (2 KM/H) from the east-northeast and humidity at 94%, the wind-chill factor is 53˚F (12˚C). Today’s forecast: Partly sunny skies and a high of 83˚F (28˚C). Tonight, we can expect partly cloudy skies and a low of 53˚F (12˚C).

This week marks the first anniversary of A Certain Point of View, Too, the blog that you, Dear Reader, are currently perusing. The actual anniversary day was on March 30; on that day last year, I was informed that my original Blogger version of A Certain Point of View had been banned by Facebook because I had been accused by Trump supporters (and specifically one Trump supporter of my acquaintance, although Facebook didn’t tell me this) of posting spam and “hateful content.”[1]

I tried to appeal, but my accuser (or accusers; I think it might have been just a few Trump supporters who did this in concert) flagged every post I had shared from late January to late March of 2020 as “hate speech” or “spam” until “Community Standards,” which by then was largely automated due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, had at least 79 (!) complaints regarding my blog. As a result, trying to resolve the dispute amicably with “the Social Network” was a lost crusade, and I (reluctantly) decided to get around the ban by creating this blog, even though this entailed the investment of $104 per annum for:

• WordPress Premium ($96 a year)
• Domain name ($8 a year)

I, of course, was not (and I’m still not) pleased with this. I was doing what I have always done since I stepped into my high school’s Newspaper Reporting & Editing class in 10^th grade and, after that, my college journalism courses: I wrote fact-based opinion pieces about political issues, especially the disastrous Presidency of Donald J. Trump and his failure to deal effectively with the COVID-19 pandemic.

I also wrote the usual mix of reviews of books, movies, TV series, and Star Wars collectibles and toys that is now the basic fare of A Certain Point of View, Too. And until that Trump supporter and a few of his like-minded “conservative” buddies reported me on Facebook, my Blogger blog was doing just fine, thank you very much, as far as page views and ad-generated revenue were concerned.

As you can see, A Certain Point of View (which I started shortly before my mother got sick in early 2010) had a long, slow gestation period and didn’t really “take off” until 2016. That’s because when I began the blog, I was still writing at Epinions, a review site that I had been a contributor for since December 2003 and, sadly, closed in February of 2014 because its presence on Google was affected by changes in that search engine’s algorithms and also because eBay – its corporate owner – just didn’t find it profitable to pay its contributors anymore. (I also used to write for the now-vanished Associated Content/Yahoo Voices, Bubblews, and the closest equivalent to being a reporter in the entertainment beat that I ever became, writing for Examiner.com as its Miami reporter [or Examiner] in the Books, Blu-ray & DVD, and Star Wars beats.)

I was also up to my eyebrows trying to be my mother’s primary caregiver, learn the ropes of being a de facto (if not de jure) homeowner, and deal with a toxic half-sister all at the same time.

Who has time for a new blog with that kind of shitstorm whirling around?

Certainly not me.

If you look at the screenshot from my All-Time Statistics page at A Certain Point of View, you’ll notice that the pageviews were almost “flatlined” for the first five years of the blog’s life. It sort-of starts picking up views in late 2015, but I was dealing with my mother’s death, the continuing drama with my half-sister, trying to get my old townhouse repaired and renovated, writing for Examiner, and starting the failed relationship with the woman I refer to here as the Caregiver, so I wasn’t exactly creating new content for A Certain Point of View.

After I was invited to move to my current digs here in New Hometown, Examiner’s corporate owner, AXA, decided to close that site down, too. And since I wasn’t keen on looking for more pay-to-create content sites, I contented myself with by focusing on A Certain Point of View and being Cerebral Palsy Guidance’s guest disabled blogger[2].

If you are a veteran blogger, you know that the more content you create, the more pageviews you get, especially if you share your blog posts on social media. Especially if you use Facebook and Twitter; those two platforms are essential if you’re going to create a blog that will survive and thrive in a world where everybody and his (or her) cousin has a blog on the Internet.

So I created content. On a daily basis.

And I shared content. On Facebook. On a daily basis. (Or at least a regular basis.)

As a result, my pageviews soared.

So much did they soar, in fact, that on one day in September of 2019, I received 74,627 pageviews.

That, Dear Reader, changed when my blog was reported to Facebook Community Standards at a time when the company was relying on automation rather than on human employees. As a result, my pageviews have sunk as surely as the Titanic did when it had that run-in with the iceberg nearly 109 years ago.[3]

So now, I’m here on WordPress, trying to get this version of A Certain Point of View to reach the same lofty heights of Pageviews Heaven as its older sibling on Blogger.

Because I post almost every day – I missed a few days early on because I was trying and failing to write for both blogs on the same day – my start here on WordPress wasn’t as slow-and-painful as it was on Blogger. Of course, having a modicum of privacy, stability, and plenty of time in which to write helps, but I also find that a strong work ethic and a dedication to creating quality content are also essential.

As you can see from the screenshots of my WordPress Statistics page, in many ways A Certain Point of View, Too is doing better than its counterpart on Blogger.  For instance, here I have 329 followers (325 on WordPress itself; four subscribe to my posts by email); there I have only 24 followers.

I also have more interactions on WordPress than on Blogger. Over the course of 11 years, 67 comments have been exchanged between readers of my blog posts and me. Here, in one-eleventh of the time, there have been 718 comments posted in back-n-forth exchanges between readers and the author.

The only advantage – if you can call it that – that the Blogger A Certain Point of View enjoys at the moment is its longevity and sheer size of content. It has been around since 2010, and I’ve published 1,372 blog posts there. And as of this writing, it has received 700,849 pageviews and a little over $65 in ad revenue.

Here, I have published 445 posts (446 with this one) and earned less than 23,000 pageviews, so I still have a long way to go until I can replicate my original blog’s success.

But I will keep trying to give you thought-provoking, entertaining, informative, and amusing articles as long as WordPress sticks around. And I will keep on speaking my mind about politics and other things that are important in our society.

I thank you, Dear Reader, for your continued support. Like all writers, I do write for my own amusement and the need to write and express myself. But I do like knowing that other folks read my blog, whether they come for the reviews, the political commentary, or the occasional slice of life piece about one person’s life in 2021 Florida.

Thank you!

https://gofund.me/86634e1b

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[1] The ban is so total that if I were to link a post, any post, from A Certain Point of View here, this post would not be allowed on Facebook, either.

[2] That gig was a good one for me, at least for a while. I got paid for creating blog posts about my disability (at a respectable rate of 4 cents a word) and telling the site’s visitors what life with CP is like for me. (I emphasize this because my experiences don’t necessarily reflect that of others with the same condition. My half-sister also has CP, yet [admirably] she was able to become independent, learned how to drive a car, and was a nurse for over 40 years until she retired in early 2015. I never got that far, and if you read my CPG blog, you’ll see why.) My posts were so well-received that my client started getting requests for me to write guest blog posts.

However, since I had – previously to that online gig – never written much about my disability, I started getting depressed and angry whenever I had to look back at my life and how my childhood and adolescence were – unavoidably – affected by cerebral palsy and the way society, especially in the “greatest nation on Earth,” treats its more vulnerable members: the young, the poor, the elderly, minorities, and the disabled. So I just stopped writing the blog. Not very professional on my part, I have to admit, but I was just not thrilled with having to delve into that aspect of my life, you know?

[3] My Blogger A Certain Point of View still gets pageviews and ad revenue, and I do have days when I get 300+ visitors. But those days are few and far between, especially since I can’t share that blog (or links to it) on Facebook.