Views, reactions, and followers on DEV in 2022

Some numbers from the dashboard

I subscribed to DEV on 2017.10.11 but hardly posted articles till 2022.11.21 when I started to get involved in this community a lot more.

• 2017: 3 articles
• 2018: 0
• 2019: 0
• 2020: 14 articles
• 2021: 7 articles
• 2022: 83 articles
• TOTAL: 107 articles

I Published 83 articles between 21 November and 31 December 2022 or about 2 articles a day.

It had an impact.

There are now 710 followers, most of them started to follow me in the last 40 days.

There were 664 post reactions so far and 26,289 total post views.

• more than 10,000 views: 1 article
• 1,000-10,000 views: 1 article
• 100-1000 views: 34 articles
• 25-100 views: 54 articles
• less than 25 views: 17 articles

My most popular post by far was the

Billions of unnecessary files in GitHub

Gabor Szabo ・ Dec 21 '22

#github #programming #python #webdev

It received 50 likes, 59 bookmarks, 40 comments and 13,639 views.

That's more views than all the other articles combined.

Second place

Open Source Development Courses

Gabor Szabo ・ Nov 28 '22

#opensource #osdc #career #discuss

With 8 likes, 10 bookmarks, 0 comments, and 1,598 views.

Third place

What does "if __name__ == '__main__'" do in Python?

Gabor Szabo ・ Dec 7 '22

#python #programming #beginners #tutorial

With 13 likes, 8 bookmarks, 7 comments, and 868 views.

Analytics Graphs

The analytics page shows some interesting graphs. Unfortunately it does not show data between arbitrary dates or at least "last year", but the graphs are interesting anyway.

The infinity graphs are interesting as they show that whatever I did before November 2022 hardly registers.
The month graphs below, already show much more nuanced information.

Month:

Conclusion

It was a short year for me on DEV. I thought it was successful even before that most popular article came out, but that clearly doubled it.

I think I can assume that going forward most of my articles will received less than 100 views and only a few get more than 1000 views.

I did not figure out how to create posts that get thousands of views, but I think I understand how to grow continuously.

I need to continue publishing content that interests the DEV readers daily. Maybe even twice a day.

Then more people will follow and on average more people will see my articles. How many more. Only the future will tell.

Happy New Year!

Comments

[Michael Tharrington]

I see a silhouette of Batman in your Readers Summary graph, haha.

But in all seriousness, this is really cool, Gabor. It's awesome to see how much everything has taken off since ya started posting regularly.

I think I can assume that going forward most of my articles will received less than 100 views and only a few get more than 1000 view.

I did not figure out how to create posts that get thousands of view, but I think I understand how to grow continuously.

I liked this bit. I think it kind highlights the power of consistency over virality. You might have a popular post break through every once and a while, but writing posts consistently is really the best way to continuously improve your writing + gain a solid following over time.

[Gabor Szabo]

I was wondering if I should mention batman 🦇, but I see it was obvious. 😊

[Benoit COUETIL 💫]

I guess that, to get more than 1000 views per article, you have to post content that is not already somewhere on internet AND that has some effort in it.

That is how it is working for me, at least 😉