It’s been 20 years since the Tokyo Fox blog began but it’s not going to be celebrated here as I kind of did that for previous anniversaries. The story of this site was told in the 10th birthday special, and five years later I shared the most popular and least popular posts from each year up to that point including how many hits they had had.

Those landmarks were very much the heyday in terms of recognition and popularity with the average number of daily hits at one time getting close to the 10,000 mark. It’s a more modest 3000 these days which isn’t too bad for an amateur blogger, but neither is it hugely impressive either! Here are 10 reasons why I feel the Tokyo Fox blog has flopped so much in terms of setting the world on fire!

1. Failure to move with the times – This blogging business all started in an era before social media and YouTube had become the beasts they are today. Back in the early-mid 2010s the number of “content” creators in Japan was far more limited but now the country is awash with such influencers. Also, blogging is rather old-fashioned now with so much video content telling people far more than what a paragraph or two of writing can. The majority of modern-day people don’t have time to spend a few minutes reading the blog of a random guy every few days!

2. Too niche – The randomness of topics hasn’t helped it grow as much as it would have had the focus been on just one of two of them. Interesting playground structures, water gates, architectural wonder buildings and sports matches in Japan are all rather niche and generally not of interest to the masses but that’s ok as there are plenty of channels out there devoted to hugely popular Japanese topics.

I can’t believe more people aren’t interested in this kind of thing!!!

3. Failure to use social media more effectively – You’ve really got to get a leg up from friends but I was always too embarrassed or reluctant to ask for (beg!) likes, comments, reposts and so on in the very early days. Likewise on social media where you don’t want to be seen as constantly pushing for attention or playing the game where you follow and comment on other people’s stuff in the hope they return the favour.

4. Failure to use more clickbait-y titles & thumbnails – This was something I was just unaware of for many years and titles really were quite dull and just included the name of the place or whatever that I visited. Unless the thumbnail picture was amazing, it’s very unlikely anyone would’ve been too eager to click on a post titled ‘Ofunakannon-ji Temple‘ or whatever!

The photo used for this post’s thumbnail

5. Poor grammar and punctuation – I find it difficult to take anyone’s opinion seriously on social media when it’s grammatically inaccurate, and the same applies for myself so whenever I come across old posts, I often cringe with embarrassment at some of the mistakes I’ve made. As an English language teacher, I really should know better.

6. Reluctance to accept sponsorship or promote products – Whilst not being flooded with offers, there is something in my inbox every day or three asking if I’d like to include a third-party post on a topic even more bizarre than the ones I choose to post about. I’ve done a few sponsored things in the past but have generally ignored the vast majority of offers to promote certain snack packs or website apps as they’d just seem too out of place.

7. Stubbornness – Rather than chasing hits by producing more clickbait-like content I have stubbornly always decided to write about various things of interest to me. The majority of them have been Japan-related but there’s always the occasional dip into other categories.

8. Ignorance of analytics – When this blog migrated to WordPress around 2010 it offered a whole new world of statistical analysis which was interesting to monitor at first but I never really tried to seriously grow this blog by using all that information to my benefit. I honestly look at the statistics very rarely. Maybe I should monitor them a bit more!

Popular?? Hmmm!

9. Quantity of quality – A couple of years ago I went back through the archives and deleted over thirty posts as I felt they were either rubbish, filler or didn’t fit in with what the site had become. Whilst I’m very proud to have been very consistent with uploads since moving to WordPress, there have probably been too many filler posts, and I’m still pretty amazed that I managed to produce 10 posts each and every month between November 2011 and December 2023.

10. Lack of ambition – Despite some mild success in the early 2010s with some of my movie locations posts, I never really took this blogging business too seriously and thus failed to capitalise on the heightened interest in this site at the time. This blog has only ever been seen as a hobby and so I never really put too much effort into trying to grow it.

The 1st 3 posts on Tokyo Fox!

Now if you’re thinking this is a rather bleak way of celebrating 20 years of blogging, then please know that it’s all rather tongue-in-cheek and I am very accepting of all the above reasons. It’s been a labour of love and is a nice record of all that I’ve seen and done in the last two decades, but will it make it to the 25th anniversary in 3031?!!

Click here to read ’15 Years of Tokyo Fox: The Posts with the “Least” Hits for Each Year’

Click here to read ’15 Years of Tokyo Fox: The Posts with the “Most” Hits for Each Year’

Click here to read ‘The A-Z of Tokyo Fox Celebrating 15 Years of Blogging (Part 1)’

Click here to read ‘The A-Z of Tokyo Fox Celebrating 15 Years of Blogging (Part 2)’

Click here to read ‘Celebrating 10 Years of Tokyo Fox’