selenicseas

I’ve had a Neocities site since the end of February 2023. I started keeping track of the views in mid-June, as I thought it would be interesting to see how many people visited the site each month. For most of 2023, I averaged around 1000 views per month. I thought that number was pretty high. Surely 1000 people couldn’t be looking at my website each month?

2024 rolled around, and the first four months were largely similar, with around 1000 views per month. Then something strange happened in May: I went from 14,024 to 20,653 views. The jump was so high it was even visible on Neocities’ own stats page for the website:

That same stats page (viewable on https://neocities.org/site/WEBSITENAMEHERE/stats) for Neocities users also says what I was expecting: “due to bots, search engine crawlers, and proxy servers, these numbers should not be considered completely accurate”.

I started 2024 with 8,578 views and ended with 39,264. Even considering that some of those views aren’t real, how in the world did I get 30,000 views in a single year? Who in the world is looking at my website? Is there really that much bot traffic out there? How much of the Internet is already dead?

I’ve been thinking about adding some kind of guestbook or comment system for the past few months. Perhaps if I did, I’d see if there were actual people visiting my website. Alternately, I could end up getting spam comments. It’s something to think about, at least.