I wonder how many of you have been tagged in a FB post by author Frank Viola? His post from July 3 explains how he garnered 350,000 page views on his site in one month. He writes, “Last month (June 2013), my Patheos blog broke all previous records for page views, visitors, and unique visitors on the blog to date.”

On a quick read, this impresses–as he certainly hoped it would. But if we look at the chart he so helpfully attached, one detail jumps out: Average Visit Duration.

You can see, it’s forty-nine second. I am a fast reader. I turned on my stopwatch and clicked the link for the specific blog that was his most popular (I am not going to put the link here as that would just contribute to his numbers). I was able to read about one third of the post in forty-nine seconds.

As I read that figure, I had an epiphany that might re-direct my writing career. What if I stopped writing for readers and started writing for numbers? I would no longer have to worry so much about my subject matter, my craft, or accuracy. By creating headlines such as, “How to Tell If Your Boss Is an Addict,” “What Churches Actually Do with Your Tithe Money,” or anything with the words sex, breast, or Kardashian, I too could become a well known blogger.

Richard Nieva wrote in a December 2012 blog, “Paying too close attention to any type of metric can be dangerous for writers, because it can lead to writing pointless click-bait. Or it can encourage sensationalism. Or it can seduce you into writing articles engineered around SEO (Search Engine Optimized for those of you lucky enough not to care).”

In all seriousness, I don’t mean to imply that Viola is anything less than a marketing genius. Additionally, I have never had the experience of a post or article going viral. Perhaps it’s heady stuff, akin to the first snort of coke but without the cost or negative stigma.

However, it’s difficult not to assume that as writers, we are being trained like Pavlovian dogs to prove our legitimacy with ever-increasing statistics. I wonder, how will Viola feel if his numbers drop for July? Will he panic? Will he deploy another app–such as tagging anyone who has ever opened one of his blogs?

From my current vantage point, I would prefer to have a small percentage of Viola’s numbers and receive the kind of feedback that communicates to me that my writing was actually read and that perhaps it moved folks. Perhaps Google Analytics is feverishly working on such an algorithm. I’ll wait for it. And in the meantime, would you mind sharing this? 🙂