October 13, 2020
It was originally started in January, mainly for my own benefit and amusement, simply as a diary of sporting events I had attended, such as local football and rugby teams, Ice Hockey on a visit to Prague and some cricket whilst on holiday in Australia. However, Covid-19 and the lockdown quickly put an end to that !
With nothing else to watch, out of boredom I started watching the live football streams on YouTube from Belarus, and with nothing else to do during lockdown, started writing about it. The Belarus Women’s league started so I began to watch and write about that as well. The lockdown gave me time to sort out all of my football programmes and magazines that were cluttering up the house and garage, and the blog about that exercise struck a chord with a number of people who read it.
Football then restarted in Taiwan and South Korea so I watched and made observations about this. Germany was the first major European country to restart after the suspensions, so naturally I chose to watch and comment on a Second Division game rather than the Bundesliga on the TV !
Other countries gradually restarted their football leagues so I was able to see live games from Serbia, Armenia, Lithuania & Montenegro which led to the idea of preparing a guide on how to watch freely available football highlights from every country. Until this weekend this was the most popular blog item into terms of recorded views.
Items on football in Hungary, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland and Czech Republic followed, but Belarus has remained the staple content, with weekly comments on the Belarus Premier League.
I have recently been able to attend two real, live local football matches in England, but who knows how much longer this will be possible for ! The most recent game is now the most viewed blog….
Fatbear’s Sporting Diaries now appears in some Google searches and there have been one or two views from some very strange looking sources !
To-date, the total number of views is just over 3,600, with viewers in the UK comprising 60% of the total. The USA has 14% of the views but I suspect some of this could be people viewing whilst using their company VPN ! Germany and Portugal have the next highest percentages but there have been views from far and wide, including Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, Philippines, Kenya, India, UAE, Russia, Ukraine, and even Belarus !
One article was very popular in Lithuania, whilst two early blogs have not been read by anyone !
I am using Blogspot, which is a free to use tool but unlike some other forms of social media no income is earned from the number of views. To do that I would have to graduate to another tool such as Wordpress but that comes with annual fees for licences and domain names, for potentially tiny returns. I am happy writing as a hobby ( well, for now anyway ! )
Over the course of the year I have lost 20kg ( 3 stone ) in weight so have thought about renaming the diaries. However, Not So Fat Bear’s Sporting Diaries or Still Could Do With Losing A Few More Pounds Bear’s Sporting Diaries doesn’t quite have the same ring to it !
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