>I want to read blogs by people who are passionate about their topic [...]

I didn't downvote but want to try to explain some of the mindset of some of the authors who do care about analytics and how it affects what they work on.

The 2 different activities need to be separated:

(1) passionate about a _topic_

vs

(2) passionate about _writing_about_ a topic.

Some people need some validation from a growing audience (i.e. see visitor stats) to continue to work on (2).

An example of this I came across was a analyst who was really knowledgeable about tele-communications, cell towers, datacenters, etc. He wrote some blogs and created videos about how the industry players work. It was really good analytical work. Unfortunately, he didn't gain a big audience following from it and quit after just 10 months.

He's still in the industry and I'm sure he's still "passionate" about the topic of next gen cell towers, etc. Just no longer passionate about blogging into an empty void.

One could then argue, "why does an author need to care about blogging to an empty void?!?". I don't know what to say. I guess it's just humans being humans and some want a little social proof that whatever they put a lot of time into is useful to more people than a tiny niche audience.

> One could then argue, "why does an author need to care about blogging to an empty void?!?". I don't know what to say. I guess it's just humans being humans and some want a little social proof that whatever they put a lot of time into is useful to more people than a tiny niche audience.

In my case, there’s a social proof element, but it’s also nice to know if I’m basically talking to myself or if there’s somebody out there listening. If it’s the former I feel kind of silly, like someone sitting in an empty room muttering to themselves might, plus writing takes time and energy that I could be putting towards something else. You know how there’s some meals that feel worth cooking if there’s even one other person who’ll be eating, but not if it’s just yourself? It’s like that.

Keeping a count of how many views and comments a blog post gets is not analytics. Analytics is gathering deep data about the demographics of those numbers. It’s learning about the age, sex, race, income, country of origin, education, occupation, etc. of your readers.

This is information that’s irrelevant to a person who is merely passionate about a topic and wants to write and share about it. It’s information used solely for increasing engagement and making money.