A MILLION HITS AND A DOLLAR MAY NOT EVEN BUY A CUP OF COFFEESometime early this morning, when everyone was fast asleep, my personal web page attracted its one-millionth hit. I have to wonder who is accessing the page. I have had a "tip jar" button on the page since around hit 30,000. Since this blog has a permanent link to the web page, I expected some of the blog readers to go there, and hoped that some of them would indicate their appreciation for the material by leaving a few pennies -- or maybe even a whole dollar, now and then.
So, over 970,000 hits later, how much do you think I have in my PayPal account, to show for this little experiment?
If everyone had left $1, I would have $970,000. If one-in-100 had left a dollar, I would have $9,700. If one-in-a-thousand had left a dime, I would have $97.00. If one-in-ten-thousand had left a penny, I would have ninety-seven cents.
I have $0.00. That's right. Goose-egg dollars and no cents.
Since the appeal for tips included something about "encouraging" my "behavior," I can only gather that any readers of the blog who went to my personal page and saw the tip button, did not want to encourage my behavior, at least enough to leave any kind of tip whatsoever via PayPal. Only a very small number (countable on the fingers of one hand) even bothered to send free email, just to say "hi," and thereby offer the small but significant encouragement of one human being recognizing the existence of another.
So are you guys all web-robots out there? I can't imagine that hundreds of thousands of real human beings would have visited my personal web page without at least a wave, or the occasionally flipped birdie, in email form. Come on now, I know you're there: I can hear you beeping and whirring, amidst the echoing cricket chirps.
