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Interesting. I have a blog. I deleted my Facebook presence in July 2019. Readership went up, same as sales of my books.

Is it possible that Facebook sells you an audience that would have found you anyway?

Genuinely curious: What other ways would your audience have found you?

I’ve given thought to how a new web site or business quickly grows an audience without social. With search engines, the site still needs to be “seen” by the engine and compete with more established sites.

I have a free reprint policy, so my texts are often reprinted elsewhere with attribution and link to the original version on my site. Also, some people have the habit of sending links to interesting texts (or what they deem to be interesting) around by e-mail.

There are many spontaneous undercurrents in the pond of the Internet. It is also the reason why fake news are so hard to root out.

Thank you! This is actually very helpful to know. I’ve been talking with someone about using a Creative Commons model for sharing content to gain attention/traffic, but I wasn’t sure if it worked in the wild.

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