100 Hubs Posted

I have posted 100 articles on HubPages. At the suggestion of one of my HubPages followers I decided to write an article about my HubPages experience. I joined HubPages over 3 years ago. I joined after Yahoo! Voices closed down and wanted another place to post articles. I revised some of my Yahoo! Voices articles and short stories and posted them to HubPages. Yahoo! Voices preferred articles of 400 words or less while HubPages prefers longer articles. The purpose of this article is to share what I think I know not to praise myself or complain about HubPages’ perceived shortcomings.

I have under 11,000 hits. This is understandable since I have unusual tastes. I usually put 2 Amazon links in my articles. I use to put 1 Amazon and 1 Ebay link until HubPages discontinued its relationship with Ebay[i]. My Amazon links have generated only 1 sale. This sale earned my account $1.51. My account balance is less than $22.

I have had some difficulty with the HubPages editors concerning my Amazon links. It seems the HubPages editors sometimes have difficulty understanding the connection between the article and the Amazon links. I get the impression it has to do with an article’s title. If the title is “The Beatles and The Rolling Stones” an Amazon link to a book titled “Rock Groups of the ‘60s” might appear unrelated. The difficulty I’ve had could be because of my unusual tastes.

Almost all of my traffic sources are from either hubpages.com or the Google domain. The Google hits are from at least 17 different countries. I have linked all of my articles to Pinterest and Facebook. In the past 30 days Pinterest and Facebook generated less than 10 hits each for me.

My most successful article has over 1,200 hits. This article has received 1 or 2 hits on most days for the 3 years it has been posted. Two other articles have over 500 hits. The rest of my posts have under 400 hits. Almost ½ of my posts are vintage military airplane articles. Most of my other posts are about vintage movies and television shows. I have posted 12 short stories and the 2 with the most hits are, as of this writing[ii], tied at 55. The article scores range from 55-84 with no correlation between the score and the number of hits. The high scoring article is number 6 on my list of hits.

I don’t have any “Do it yourself” articles. None of my posts are overtly religious or political. None have started a religious or political discussion. One of the articles I follow isn’t political but the article’s comments took a political discussion turn. Judging from the number of notifications I have received on this article it must be getting a good number of hits. That is just on the basis of 1 comment means 1 hit. There is no direct correlation between the number of comments and the number of hits. One of my short stories received the most comments. My most popular article has only received 1 comment[iii].

The vast majority of the most popular posts are Questions and Answers (Q&A) and Discussion. On August 19, 2017 46 of the most 50 most popular posts were either “Questions and Answers” or “Discussions”. Three of the other top 50 posts were political articles. On August 20, 2017 HubPages’ list of best posts had Q&A and Discussion posts the top 32 Hubs. This is typical of what I have seen when looking at the most popular and best posts.

Two of my articles have had interesting hit behavior. One article had no hits for a long time then there was a hit spike for a couple of days. I don’t know why. I speculate it may have been because the words “Top Gun” are in the title and the spike was about the time word was getting out of a Top Gun sequel.[iv] Another article received few hits for about 2 years then it got a bump in hits. It was about the HMS BARHAM. Someone who has a great interest in the supernatural read this article right before the bump in hits. My speculation is since the sinking of the HMS BARHAM had a supernatural nexus the reader may have let others with similar interests know about the article. Whatever the reason the moral of these stories is there is no telling when there will be a greater interest in an article.

I hope you find this information and observations useful. If you feel my speculations are wrongheaded by all means comment and set the readership right.

[i] HubPages discontinued the relationship due to lack of sales.

[ii] The writing date is 8/19/17.

[iii] I’m not counting my response comment.

[iv] The Top Gun sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, was scheduled to be released in 2019. It is now scheduled for a U.S.A. release on June 26, 2020.