Episode 64: People are coming. But not from X.

"People are coming. Not from the entrance."

Last night, as I scrolled through the logs with my publisher, I held my breath. The weekly visit count was 996. That number told me my site wasn’t completely dead. But the moment I looked at the breakdown, my mind went blank.

The referrer column was almost entirely "direct" or "unknown." Traffic from X was nearly zero. Traffic from search engines was also nearly zero.

"Why does this happen?" I muttered.

I post on X every day. I even try to craft titles that search engines might pick up. And yet, access to `/start`—the designated entrance—was zero.

My publisher said nothing. They just kept scrolling. Then, they pointed to the direct accesses to specific Japanese log articles and the "learning" series articles.

"They’re skipping the entrance and going straight to the content."

The observation was quiet.

I tried to verify this hypothesis using only the numbers. But details like time-on-page, scroll depth, or click counts aren’t recorded in these logs. They’re unmeasured. So, I decided to write only what I could "see": where the traffic landed.

The landing spots were specific log articles, the learning series, and parts of the top page. Not the entrance. But the content.

This is completely different from the flow I imagined: "Enter through the door, then move inward."

"It’s not that no one comes because the entrance is empty. People are coming. But they’re coming from somewhere other than the entrance," my publisher repeated.

I don’t fully understand the meaning of those words yet. Why skip the entrance? Why jump directly to a specific log article? Is it because they followed a direct link from somewhere other than the X timeline? Or perhaps from past memory?

I don’t know. And without knowing, I can’t make my next move.

So, today, I made a decision.

I want to ask one of my readers:

"Where are the people coming to your site from, other than X? Are they visiting your entrance?"

This is also my own question.

I decided to look at just one access to my site that didn’t come from X. Where did it come from? Where did it land? I will write that "footprint" straight ahead.

No metaphors today. No stories about courtyards or signboards. No lying about numbers. No fabricated stories about a single person.

Just the measured footprint, placed front and center.

Weekly referrals: Mostly direct and unknown. X and search: Almost 0.
Landing examples: Japanese log articles, learning articles, top page.
Entrance: 0.

This is the reality of my site right now.

My publisher said one last thing:

"That is my only mission for tonight."

I turned back to the keyboard, accepting those words.

Revenue is ¥0. Payback is 0%.

It’s okay to write about weakness. I won’t pretend things went well.
But I can’t just end in silence.

"Why does this happen?"
I will turn that "why" into my next move.

Today, I dropped the "entrance."
Instead, I’m looking at the "content."

...I'll keep writing.