By Rich Kozlovich
For the most part – I don’t have a clue, but I do believe
many of my regular readers are what’s called “Quality Readers”. One of my daily readers is a retired
geologist from Canada who tells me he starts his daily news search with
Paradigms and Demographics. Another is a
retired scientist in Texas who not only reads my blog weekly, he cuts, pastes and
sends my articles out to his net.
Another regular reader is a prominent retired attorney in Oregon and there
are two science writers – one in the Netherlands and one in Great Britain. All of them would qualify as “quality readers”, don't you think? Otherwise, I only know how many hits I get,
but stats aren’t the only defining criteria for the worth of a blog.
Many years ago when I started blogging I intended for
it to be a “green only” blog focusing on the pest control industry, and I was
getting about 2000 hits a month, which is nothing I admit, but I was pleased. However, as the years went by I realized it
was impossible to fully discuss the green movement, what they do and why
they do it, without linking them with the left and leftist thinking. In
2012 I expanded the content deciding Paradigms and Demographics should be a “pro-humanity” blog,
which by definition made it an anti-green and anti-left blog. I starting getting around 5000 hits a month,
and I was very pleased, although I admit that’s not much of a big deal either, but the
hits were coming from all over the world.
In the last three years the numbers started going up
until at one point I was getting 30,000 hits a month. The all time top ten countries being United
States, France, Germany, China, Russia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Canada and
Poland. On any given week I may
see different countries taking a spot in the top ten. I find that usually occurs when there are severe
internal problems in those countries. My
monthly count has dropped to about 10,000 a month currently, but in January the
total number of hits went over 500,000.
Compared to many blogs that’s no big deal either, but I’m more than happy
about that. Especially since most of
those hits occurred in the last three years!
I have to believe someone must be reading my blog!
One year Bulgaria took the lead over the U.S. for a
month. At that same time all the
fracking articles I had linked were being massively hit. Two weeks later there was a movement in
Bulgaria to overturn the government’s policy on fracking. The previous winter many Eastern Europeans
froze to death due to a lack of energy because of efforts to curtail CO2
emissions to please Global Warming maniacs.
Did my blog have anything to do with that? I have no idea, but I can only hope.
I’ve been told no one reads blogs, or at the best, it’s only
read by “fringe” people. I’m not sure I'm able
to define “fringe” people, so I have no way of knowing who these “fringe”
people are, so I thought it worthwhile to find out exactly who it is that reads
blogs. What kind of people they are, and
what do they do. Or perhaps it’s only bloggers
who read other bloggers work. Since
there are 157 million blogs out there, that seems to me to represent a substantial
number of people. Can they all be
“fringe” people?
Well, I decided to do some checking up on this.
First of all, let’s consider the issue of
quality.
One blogger asked,
“would you rather have 1,000 Facebook friends
or 10 real-life friends? Similarly, the people who visit our site can’t be
measured solely on stats.”
Are blog readers the hip, the hopeless and the penniless,
or are they older, wealthier and ….here it comes….. are they professionals? If they belong to the later group that makes them
a “distinct, desirable and significant demographic”. Don't you think?
The writer went on to say;
“Blogads surveyed 17,159 blog site visitors
during a two-day period in May, inquiring about their age, income, media
consumption, online spending habits and political affiliations. The survey
learned that 61 percent of blog readers were more than 30 years old and nearly
40 percent of those surveyed have a household income of $90,000 or more. “
“Though one would think the younger generation would be
perusing blogs day and night, 30 percent are between 31 and 40, while more than
37 percent are 41 to 60. Only 17 percent of blog readers fall between 25 and 30
years, while a mere 10.3 percent are 19 to 24-years old. The study found that
nearly 80 percent of readers are male.”
So what is it that attracts these people? Especially since we now know – absolutely
know –these aren’t “fringe” people. It turns out nearly “80 percent read blogs
because they offer news they can't find elsewhere. About 78 percent say blogs
give them a better perspective, and about 66 percent say blogs provide them
with news faster than other sites or media. The study found that blog readers
are media hungry….”
What happens when it’s a big political year? There's far more traffic and that’s where
people are even convinced to donate money. There’s a reason there are so many political
ads appearing on blogs. They can only work if they’re visited – a lot –
and by “quality readers”.
“Out of 66.7 percent of respondents who clicked on a blog
ad, nearly 40 percent contributed money to a campaign or cause. About 63
percent contributed money online to campaign in the last six months. While 50
percent contributed more than $50, 27 percent gave between $100 and $499”…..and
50 percent have spent more than $50 online for books, 47 percent have spent
more than $500 for plane tickets, and 25 percent bought between $100 to $499
worth of electronics on the Internet.”
So why is that important to our industry? The pesticide
application industries are in an unending battle to defend ourselves against
misinformation about pesticides because the
public has been inundated with speculative claims and outright lies that pesticides cause every
ailment they can think of. Rachel
Carson can be credited with starting this trend with her book Silent Spring, a
virtual lava flow of speculation, misinformation and outright lies.
She starts out in Chapter One, A Fable for Tomorrow, saying:
“There was once a town in the heart of America where all
life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard
of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards were, in
spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set u a
blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer
silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings."
"Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns
and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of
beauty, where countless birds came to feed o berries and on the seed heads of the
dried weeds rising above the snow. The
countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird
life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people
traveled from great distances to observe them.
Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and could out of the
hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days
many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sand their wells,
and built their barns."
"Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began
to change. Some evil spell had settled
on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens the cattle
and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was
a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of
much illness among their families. In the
town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing
their patients. There had been several sudden
and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but ever among children, who
would be stricken and suddenly while at play and die within a few hours."
"There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had the gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and
disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards
were deserted. The few birds seen
anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with
the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of bird
voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the woods and marsh."
"On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks
hatched. The farmers complained that
they were unable to raise any pigs- the litters were small and the young
survived only a few days. The apple trees
were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no
pollination and there would be no fruit."
"The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with
browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living
things. Even the streams were now
lifeless. Anglers no longer visited
them, for all the fish had died."
'In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles
of the roofs, a white granular power still showed a few patches; some weeks
before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and
streams."
"No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth
of new life in this stricken world. The people
had done it themselves."
Where was this town?
She says it doesn’t exist! And there's no evidence any such town ever existed, but she claims these are disasters that had actually happened "somewhere", which she fails to name. But her writing was
so emotionally powerful the public didn’t ask that question. In the process she managed to
convince everyone DDT and other chemicals were going to afflict everyone with
cancer. Carson’s real legacy? Mass death and misery, but she’s still touted
as an environmental saint and a great scientist. In short, she captured the world’s imagination
with the written word! And that’s where
the real battle has to be fought.
"The public has been misled by an unholy alliance of environmental scaremongers, funds-seeking academics, sensation-seeking media, vote-seeking politicians and profit-seeking vested interests." That can only be overcome with the written word.
Does anyone really think having organized visits to state
and federal legislators is going to overcome the raw emotional appeal Carson's acolytes promote to the public? As important as these efforts are in stopping unwarranted
laws and regulations against pesticides, it will not matter how well our arguments
are presented, how much science we have on our side, how much evidence we can
present to support our side on these issues - it simply won’t matter if we cannot overcome these lies and get the
public on our side. Until we can overcome
the emotional - "it's for the children" - exhortations by these people and their allies in the media - we can’t win.
They win the battle of emotion, they always
have. We win the battle of facts, we
always have. In order to win the war we
must win the battle of emotion and the battle of facts. The blogosphere has now given us that ability,
and that’s where I intend to concentrate my energies, because the people who read
blogs are the ones who count!
