Wednesday, January 7, 2015

The Gazette after six months

Six months ago, I launched Zephod's Gazette - a photo magazine. Since then it has been published daily at 7am and broadcast via Twitter. It has been published approximately 180 times. It has been viewed, according to the stats, 129 times. Publication reflects content provided by various users around the internet. Clearly most are not even interested in seeing that their content has been promoted. There are approximately 40 contributors per issue.

Another interesting thing is that promoting the paper via my Twitter account has not increased my Twitter following one little bit. I didn't really expect it would. This was largely just an experiment. I produce no content for the paper though it feeds articles off my blogs when a new article is published.

In conjunction with the photo paper, I also publish a political paper that follows the antics of the buffoon elected as Governor of South Carolina. How many times has it been proven that states fully supporting Obamacare are more prosperous as a result yet South Carolina's Governor pretends it isn't so and rejects Obamacare. That has had a few more viewers. I produce no content for that paper, instead relying upon generated content.

The only thing that I can really tell from all that is that automatically-generated newspapers don't attract viewers or readers. I notice also that the site I chose for them wants money in order to allow me to make money from advertising spaces on the paper. Clearly they're making a bit of money from people that believe their papers are going to take off majorly but the people with the papers are making no money.

It's very much like this blog - it gets a few daily and weekly viewers. Indeed it gets about 100 - 200 "views" a day yet so few clicks on advertising that it makes and income of maybe 25 cents a month. The gazette has not made my blog more popular nor my Twitter more popular. It's not worth deleting the paper just as it's not worth deleting Twitter. In a way, Twitter and automatic papers are like the dirt on your car - something that might protect the paint finish but which probably and practically has no effect whatsoever other than looking vaguely untidy.

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