I've Created a Monster!

Thursday April 5, 5:23 p.m.

It's amazing what the right niche blog can do. My sister blog on Japanese popular music of the 70s and 80s, www.kayokyokuplus.blogspot.com, has accomplished in 9 short weeks of existence that my very first blog on life in Japan couldn't do in 9 years. It's already garnered over 2,500 pageviews, almost doubling the pageviews that I'd ever had on "A Canuck in Emperor Akihito's Court", and far outstripping what I've gotten for this blog, although this blog has more posts and started a few weeks earlier.

But the superburst in traffic started a few days ago when an article I'd posted a few weeks ago got attention from an otaku website by the name of Kotaku.com. The Japanese techno girl unit, Perfume, was being featured there and the author compared them to an old girl trio from the early 1970s by the name of The Candies. He or she found my article on The Candies, and suddenly Kotaku's viewers flooded into my little niche world of music. I can only hope that these folks will also take a gander at some of the other artists as well.

It's definitely been interesting where these pageviews have been originating from. Of course, the United States, Canada and Japan have been well represented but I've also been getting tapped by nations like Ecuador, Costa Rica, Sweden and India. Perhaps the tappers are nostalgic Japanese expats but they could actually be anime-swooning natives. Africa had been the only continent that hadn't made its presence felt but I finally got that pageview from Egypt a few days ago.

Now, if only I could somehow harness all this amazing worldwide interest in kayo kyoku into financial rewards...