Almost exactly one year ago, I took a leap outside the comfortable boundaries of LinkedIn, and launched my blog http://www.downhill-data.com.

Back then, I hoped to achieve a few things:

• Reach a wider audience than my immediate LinkedIn network allowed
• Avoid falling into the trap of catering to the LinkedIn algorithm
• Eliminate the reliance on LinkedIn as hosting infrastructure/backup of all my writing, and the risk of losing it all should I get hacked/banned.

I figured a small review, and a look at the numbers behind my blog, might encourage (or discourage) others to do the same.

The Numbers

Since launching my blog in February 2024, and up until the first week of January in 2025, I managed to write at least one blog post a week.

These have always been posted on both my WordPress blog (Downhill Data – A blog about data, business intelligence and the occasional bicycle.), and my Medium Blog (Jon Vöge – Medium) – usually on Tuesdays at 08:30 CET, but occasionally outside the pattern.

Highlights & reflections:

• 51 blog posts in a year (this one is number 52!)
• 55100 words…. At ~250 word per page, that is 220 pages worth, or about half a PhD dissertation.
• A total of 35832 reads (going by Views on WordPress and Reads on Medium, and not disregarding obvious “fake” views on WordPress. We can probably subtract a good 5k from that number, but its hard to judge).

Interestingly, stories that do well on WordPress are not by a long shot guaranteed to succeed on Medium and vice versa. I would say a general observation is that Medium favours Power BI content, whereas my WordPress blog trends towards Fabric content (probably fueled by my LinkedIn following).

I can’t find any good patterns in what posts seem to take off, and which don’t. Articles that took days to write might end up not being seen at all, whereas quick articles might become super popular.

In general, the only predictor I can reliable use for anything is when a blog is being reblogged by Microsoft/Newsletters/Other content creators. In those cases, views do spike significantly for that article. But outside of that, by ability to predict article success is completely absent.

The raw stats can be found below.

WordPress:

Medium:

Reflections

So… Was it worth the hassle? 100%.

While I am definitely getting fewer reads than if I had just created a LinkedIn newsletter, and posted everything there, I feel good knowing that I’m not a slave to the algorithm.

I find it absolutely awesome that people are finding my articles on Medium / blog, coming from Bing/Google or accessing the sites themselves. This is evident as I have never, ever linked directly to one of my Medium articles. Yet, those are read more than my personal blog. I find this highly amusing, and definitely gives credit to Medium as a platform for new creators.

The first month of 2025 has already seen my blogging slowing down a little.

Is it burnout?

Maybe a little. But my writing definitely comes in waves, and always has. At one point in 2024 I had a pipeline of a whopping 17 articles finished and scheduled to be published. Through the end of 2024, work got incredibly busy, and at the same time I got a lot of amazing conference gigs lined up. Both factors contributed to having less energy in my limited spare time for blogging.

I hope that 2025 can bring at least one quality blog post a month. But only time will tell. Hope to keep seeing you around!