Lathe Trolls site hits 1 million views yearly! What next?

[Steve E.]

Hi all. I thought I'd share that, according to Google Analytics, this site has finally hit 1 million page views over the course of a year! Actually, to be precise, 1,015,381 page views from October 6, 2014 to October 5, 2015.

Now, I don't want to mislead anyone. There's all sorts of garbage in that data. The page views generated by people who actually intended to visit the site are probably roughly 67% of that number. And when you divide that number by 365 days, and multiple page views, it gets smaller still. It's not yet possible to tell how many of the views are made by people visiting daily, vs. weekly, vs. once in a while. and so on.

Still! I am tickled. For a site that is intending to serve a remarkably specific special interest, it is doing just dandy.

I continue to hope that the site can also serve a somewhat broader audience. Maybe not in its active chat population, but by offering separate, parallel content for those who love listening to vinyl (plus poly cuts, and shellac, cylinders...all groovy formats!) and for those who want to get records cut or pressed.

I attempted to launch a blog here, last year. You can see the button at top ("blog"), and visit the few entries that were made. I think the efforts were hobbled a bit by:

1) The limitations of the software I implemented (it should have been the far more flexible Word Press, but that was not yet technically feasible).

2) Poor, confusing organization and layout (see #1. Word Press would improve that.)

3) A lack of a fully-developed vision on my part, and limited time and resources to expand and then implement that vision.

4) I granted authoring access to only a very small subset of the community, on a trial basis. Perhaps too small.

5) It is also possible that this idea is more exciting to me than to anyone else. But I'd like to think that some of you might get excited, too. I think there is a lot of unexplored potential here.

What I'd love to see in the next year is a parallel online periodic "Lathe Trolls" magazine. Perhaps the chat forum would be .com and the magazine would be .net. I'd love to see some of us interviewing the old pros, and the new innovators. Video content. Articles. Some toots of our own horns. The idea is, content that supplements what we do here, but is aimed also at those with a more generalized interest in records, both current and historical.

One hope would be that, once drawn in, some of the viewers might also be attracted to the products and services we Lathe Trolls are offering. (That is where advertising would come in. Yes, of course I'm thinking this way. For your sake and mine.)

I think the entries that best showed what I'd love to do with the magazine are these ones. The tour of Mastercraft, and the explanation of the beer bottle record:

http://www.lathetrolls.com/blog/Steve+E./mastercraft_plating_records_for_30_years%C7%83_b-2.html
http://www.lathetrolls.com/blog/Steve+E./beck%CA%B9s_edison_beer_bottle_cylinder_record_b-3.html

You'll see that I also posted lots of animals playing with audio equipment. I think that's important, too.

It will take time, some funding, and certainly some creative energy from the community. If you'd like to be a part of that, please be in touch with me.

PS....Perhaps such a magazine would benefit from being called something less obscure than "Lathe Trolls." I'm open to suggestions there, too.

[Aussie0zborn]

What next, you say ??? How about a free lathe for everybody ??

PS : Well done!

[jesusfwrl]

Although I wouldn't say no to a free lathe, if someone has one taking up too much space, I really do like the idea of a magazine of sorts. However, since our field of interest has more to do with big, heavy, old fashioned physical objects, I would greatly prefer an actual printed physical object of a magazine.

My preference has to do both with the principle of preferring physical objects that I can put on my shelf and come back to any time, it also has to do with my current eyesight problems, which prevent me from using a computer on my own. A physical version would probably be more difficult to organise and produce but it would be more valuable in the long term. It also doesn't have to be frequent, it could be a yearly or six monthly publication. It could also be in parallel to an online publication. Something with an old fashioned layout, preferably done with manual type setting on aged paper... am I going too far?