Building a writing habit is hard
I have been running Lykhari, a small blogging platform, for about three years. This week I opened the database and counted things. I wanted to know who actually writes, and what their writing looks like.
Most blogs never get a post
1,869 blogs have been created on Lykhari. 504 exist today. Rest were spam, which I delete by hand after manual moderation. I still kept the test blogs and empty stray blogs
Of the 504 real ones:
- 331 have never published anything
- 108 have one or two posts
- 45 have three to nine
- 15 have ten to forty nine
- 5 have fifty or more
Two out of three people who make a blog never write in it. I used to find this depressing. Now I think it is just what starting looks like. Buying a notebook is easy. Filling it is the hard part.
A few people write most of the words
There are 1,128 published posts on Lykhari, about 548,000 words in total.
Ten blogs wrote more than half of those posts. The busiest one has 184.
1% of the people are creating. Be that one percent.
If you are going to write, you write on day one
Of the people who published anything, 122 out of 166 published on the same day they signed up. The median time from signing up to the first post is about 25 minutes.
People do not sign up and come back to write a week later. They arrive with something to say.
Posts are shorter than you think
The median post is 328 words. One in ten is over a thousand. 210 posts are under a hundred words. The longest is a little over 9,000.
I like this. Short is fine. A blog is allowed to be a place for small thoughts.
People keep fixing their posts
Over half of all published posts were edited more than a day after they went live. 613 out of 1,128.
I do this too. You read your post again the next morning and see the typo, or the sentence that does not say what you meant. It is nice to know everyone does it.
Writing happens on weekdays
Thursday is the busiest day for publishing, then Monday and Wednesday. Saturday is the quietest, with about a third fewer posts than Thursday.
Some writing is older than Lykhari
314 posts on Lykhari were published before their blog existed here. People brought their archives with them from older platforms. The oldest post is from 2004.
Some of these blogs have more than twenty years of writing in them. I think that is the best use of a blog.
The money
10 people pay $5 a month for Lykhari. 17 have paid at some point.
Given that 20 blogs have ten or more posts, that means about half of the people who write regularly also pay. I did not expect that. The hard part is helping more people get from the first post to the tenth.
What I am taking from this
The people who write are few, they start fast, they write short, and they keep fixing things. They also stay. Several blogs here have been going for years.
So I am going to spend less time on features and more time on the gap between the first post and the tenth. If you have a blog you started and never came back to, I would love to hear what stopped you. Email me at kashif@lykhari.com.