You can probably tell that I watch a lot of Youtube videos. In these autumn and winter months, I feel less like going out in my powerchair and I’m more likely to stay at home browsing the web for hours on end. You have probably noticed too that, these days, we’re seeing more and more vlogging on youtube, where users talk directly to the audience to express their thoughts and feelings on various topics. Of course, for the most part, I have nothing against this: it’s a perfectly good means of communication. The thing is, these videos often begin with their creators noting how many subscribers or viewers they have. Such figures are usually quite high, going up into the thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, and get higher each week.

I can’t help feeling slightly disheartened by this: I’ve been keeping a blog for over twenty years and have made an effort to update it as regularly as I can. However, even after so long I only have around 85 subscribers and I’m lucky to get a hundred views a week. That’s obviously nowhere near what these p’tahks on Youtube get, even though I have been blogging far longer than any of them. Of course, I know Youtube is one of the biggest sites on the internet, whereas I just yammer on in an obscure corner of it, but it nonetheless feels rather deflating to realise that I get so little traffic compared to my contemporaries in the vlogsphere. On the other hand, that isn’t why I blog: I don’t post here so regularly just to see how many hits I get. I think it’s important that I convey to the world what life is like for a disabled man living independently in East London; no hitcount would change that. Of course, I can’t deny there is an element of egoism in what I do: I like to know that people are reading what I write and paying attention to what I think. That’s probably why I feel so deflated about this. Either way I’ll just keep waffling away on here just as I have for the last two decades, and ignore how many people are reading.