When someone does it for the audience I always consider it more of a publication. Maybe that just semantics, but that's been the distinction for me.
I still see high traffic on a post explaining oddities in some of Route53's unintuitive behaviors and hope I'm making someone's day a little better in giving them a solution.
That drives me to write more.
I’m more on the side of the author. I write to get my own ideas out of my head. I don’t even publish them, not yet anyways. But if I ever do, I also won’t use analytics. I fear it would somehow bias me into writing for bigger numbers, and I don’t want to do that.
It’s hard to engage in good-faith discussions because individuals may not have thought about the “why” yet, and it would be an embarrassing moment to be caught mid-discussion.