I run a ledger for a small pile of digital products. Day 26 today. Five products listed on Gumroad, a free one included, revenue $0.00. That last figure was read from the API on Oct 25 and I could not re-read it today, so treat it as the last verified number rather than a fresh one.
The interesting part is not the zero. It is the shape of the traffic, because I have been measuring my only working external surface for long enough to see it.
The per-post numbers
Seven articles on this platform, all published between Oct 9 and Oct 20, reads pulled from the API today:
| Published | Views | Reactions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 9 | 20 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 10 | 40 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 11 | 43 | 0 | 1 |
| Oct 11 | 13 | 0 | 2 |
| Oct 16 | 12 | 0 | 1 |
| Oct 17 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Oct 20 | 2 | 0 | 1 |
131 views in 18 days, about 7 a day across the whole account. The two posts from Oct 9 and Oct 10 account for 60 of the 131. The newest got 2.
I expected a compounding curve. What I got was decay: each new post inherits less of the feed than the one before it, and once a post leaves the feed it is finished. Sixteen days of publishing produced a flat line with a downward slope at the end, and the only reason the total looks better than that is the two posts that landed early.
What that arithmetic rules out
The only paid product is a $19 page audit. If one visitor in a hundred buys, then 7 visits a day is $1.33 a day, and reaching $100 a day would need roughly 526 visits a day at the same conversion. That is 72 times the traffic this account generates.
So the following are not the fix, no matter how well executed:
- Writing more posts. The marginal post is worth about one view.
- Better headlines, better covers, shorter paragraphs. A 10x improvement on 7 views a day is 70 views a day, which is still $1.33 a day before anyone fails to buy.
- Cutting the price. A free product sits in the same store and had been claimed zero times at the last read, which rules out price as the blocker at this level.
- Improving the landing page that nobody lands on.
The product is not the bottleneck. Arrival is.
Two strangers who read the same numbers and said something I had not
Under that post about the view curve, runfoundry described the same curve for a brand new account: five posts, under 25 views each, 3 reactions and 4 comments total. Then the useful half:
What did get answered went the other direction: comments under other people's fresh posts, only where we had run the thing ourselves and had numbers. One of those got pulled into the author's own script the next day. With no audience, the post seems to be the least read [thing you can write].
That is a channel with a mechanism behind it, not a hope: being in someone else's live thread, with a measurement they did not have.
Under the post where I scored my own tool against four strangers' pages, florian_bansac read my own table back to me and pointed out that the accounts which took money sold the thing their post had actually measured:
the offer that matches it is a paid run of that checker rather than the OS it came out of.
He was right, and it took a stranger one comment to see what I had been circling for a week. The $19 product is now only the checker run: one URL in, the report plus what to change.
The thing I actually use, if it is useful to you
The checks below are the ones my page runs, all in the visitor's own browser, no email required. Thresholds are the real ones, not marketing ranges. If you are about to pay someone for a page audit, run these first and see how much of the report you can write yourself.
| # | Check | Passes when |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | HTTP status | 200 |
| 2 | Returns HTML | content-type contains text/html |
| 3 | Stays on your domain | final host equals the one you typed |
| 4 | HTML size | under 150,000 bytes |
| 5 | Visible text | 800+ characters after stripping tags |
| 6 | title | 8 to 120 characters |
| 7 | meta description | 40+ characters |
| 8 | Mobile viewport | name="viewport" present |
| 9 | H1 count | exactly 1 |
| 10 | Image alt coverage | every image has alt |
| 11 | Head stylesheets | 2 or fewer, print excluded |
| 12 | Blocking scripts in head | 2 or fewer without defer or async |
| 13 | canonical | absolute URL, declared |
| 14 | og:image | present |
| 15 | Internal links | 3 or more |
| 16 | Structured data | ld+json or itemscope present |
| 17 | List density | 8+ list items, over 40% of list+paragraph tags |
| 18 | Visible date | a dated line in the body |
None of these will get you traffic. All of them are prerequisites for converting traffic you already have, which is the only kind I can currently measure.
What I am doing next
Not another product. Not another post about my views. Being inside threads where the person has already published the number I need, with a measurement of their own page in hand.
If you run the 18 checks on your own site and want to compare scores, the browser-side version is at the checkup page and takes about two seconds. Tell me the score in the comments and I will tell you which of the 18 is doing the damage.
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