97% of My Readers Weren't Mine

In mid-June I exported the back-end stats for my WeChat official account, June 3 to June 14. I only wanted to see which kinds of posts got read.

At the bottom of the sheet: 11,116 total reads. 10,780 of them came from "Recommended."

10,780 divided by 11,116 is 97%. That number stopped me for a second.

First, what "Recommended" means. A post on a WeChat official account reaches people in two ways. One: people who follow you open it from their subscription list. Two: WeChat drops it into the feeds of people who don't follow you, and the dashboard counts that as recommended traffic. The first kind you build up yourself, bit by bit. The second is handed out entirely by the platform's algorithm, under rules you never get to see.

In that same stretch I published 40 posts. Only 11 ever got any recommended traffic. The other 29 got exactly zero.

What to write, how to write it, what time to post: all my call. But whether anyone ends up reading it, 97% of that isn't up to me.

That number finally clarified something I'd been chewing on for a while: when people pick a side hustle, they compare tracks. Hardly anyone asks where on the track they're standing.

Side-hustle talk is almost always about what to do: AI writing, mini-apps, freelance gigs, cross-border e-commerce, running a content account. Every six months there's a new hot list, and the comments are always full of "is it too late to get in?"

But on the same track, people's situations can be several tiers apart.

A ride-hailing driver and the ride-hailing platform are both in the transport business. An indie developer selling an app and the app store itself are both in the app business. The first one earns per ride; the second sets the commission. The first one stays up fixing bugs; the second sets the review rules.

On the same track, the gap comes down to three things: who sets the price, who changes the rules, and who absorbs the swings for everyone else.

Here's a number you can check. Apple's standard commission on paid apps and in-app purchases is 30%. Small developers who made under $1 million in the prior year can apply for its Small Business Program and pay 15%. Developers don't negotiate that rate; they either accept it or stay off the store. If the review rules change one day, they change with them.

Standing in the priced-by-others slot, effort can raise the quality of what you produce. It can't change the revenue split or the distribution rules.

That's also why switching tracks often doesn't help. Going from writing articles to short videos, or from freelancing to selling templates, usually just moves you from one priced-by-others slot to another. The name changed. The slot didn't.

Back to that 97%.

Being allocated isn't all bad. Recommended traffic is basically rented traffic: no need to build an audience first, and a single post can land in front of thousands of strangers. For someone who writes on the side, that's a real benefit, and I've been enjoying it the whole time.

The rent is paid in uncertainty. Posts I wrote with the same care: 29 out of 40 got zero recommendations. Why those 29, I can't tell you, and there's no one to ask. Pushed today, not pushed tomorrow, and no email ever tells you why.

There's a sneakier kind of rent too: the slot reshapes the person standing in it.

The stats sit right there in the dashboard, and you naturally start guessing what the recommender likes. How to phrase the title, how to hook the opening, what time to post. Do that long enough and the starting point of writing slides from "what do I want to say" to "what does the system want." I've set myself a list of rules just to hold that pull back: which sentence patterns can't repeat, which title formulas can't show up post after post. The more detailed those rules get, the more it shows how strong the pull is.

I accept that rent. Someone who writes after work isn't going to conjure up their own distribution channel out of nowhere. Being priced by others is the entry fee.

Every post I write also gets synced to my personal blog, the one you're reading now.

Put the two side by side and the contrast is obvious.

The WeChat slot: big numbers, fast, you know how a post did the same day. But the traffic isn't mine, and one rule change could take it to zero. The blog slot: far fewer readers, slow, mostly people trickling in from search. But the domain is mine, the posts are mine, and no single company can wipe it out with one click.

WeChat gives me today's readers. The blog collects the few people who arrive without anyone allocating them.

So moving up a slot isn't about switching tracks. It's about slowly building up, on the same track, a few things that don't pass through someone else's allocation: a domain of your own, a list of readers you can reach directly, a reason for people to search your name on purpose.

None of these come fast. A driver trying to build a base of regulars, an indie dev trying to own a user base: same slow road.

These days when I check the dashboard, I watch one more number: the share of reads that didn't come from recommendations. Back in June it was 3%.

If that number ever starts climbing on its own, it means some people are coming looking for "Lao Hua" by name. Until then, I know exactly which slot I'm standing in.