My blog has received a total of only 1,289 comments in a period of about a year and a half. That's an average of around 71 comments per month, and many of them are from me personally in discussions with readers, so really probably only about 60 or so per month are from readers.
And really, about half of all of the comments I've gotten in the last 18 or so months came on just five or so articles/posts. Meaning I really probably only get about 20 comments per month from readers most of the time. Of those, some are from the same people posting multiple comments, so we could safely say the number of unique individuals commenting on my blog per month is around 15 or so.
But despite that low level of commenting, I had a million-and-a-quarter total views last month, with more than 550,000 unique visitors. That was a pretty good month for me, my first topping a million views, but I pretty consistently average in the quarter-million range for unique visitors (sometimes much higher, sometimes closer to 200,000) and have a very healthy repeat viewership percentage as well.
The important factors for a blog are (a) viewership, (b) promotion of your blog by viewers via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media, (c) consistency of viewership and promotion of your blog by viewers, and (d) how much your blog reflects knowing your audience. If you are doing the last one right, then the rest should reflect that, and if it doesn't then that might be where you need to focus the most attention.
Which means the measurements of success should look at whether the readership and consistent positive reaction (promotion by readers) signifies you are responsive to your reader's preferences and interests due to knowing your readers.
If your readership is low and you get little to no promotion from your readers, that's a big clue that you have a problem. Now, you might prefer to think it means you just aren't reaching enough people, but that's just another way of wording the fact that you don't "know" and respond to your readers in terms of reaching out to them and knowing how and where to appeal to them for their attention.
In the end, it always comes down to knowing and understanding your readers, and giving them what they want and expect, in order to gain and hold their attention. If you focus on those things consistently, and work to try and improve your knowledge of your readers and give them what they want -- which, if you're doing this right, you'll know from their reactions to what you do give them and their reactions to what other people give them elsewhere -- then you should see readership rise while your promotion by readers increases as well.
For my own blog as an example, I've already had more than a quarter-million views this month, and I've only posted two articles so far -- one of those just this afternoon. I now average around 10,000 or more views per day, and here is the really important point: I average that even when I haven't posted anything new. Why? Because my readers continue promoting my posts in social media, and those new readers promote them, and so on, so that I have a consistent growth for my blog.
The indications of success for me personally has been when I started to see that consistent rise in readership numbers, consistent tendency toward promotion of my articles by my readers, and when I really understood that the numbers get better the more I am responsive to the trends in reader interest. Movie lists and movie reviews, for example, are extremely popular. Articles about the technical side of filmmaking get far less readership, even though I love writing them and will continue to hammer away trying to increase readership for them as I try to further expand the audience for my blog. What I'm saying is, I feel I'm getting better at knowing my audience and understanding what they want/expect from my blog, so the more I respect that and provide it, the more success I have.
So the final measure of success, for me, is how accurately responsive the blog is to the desires and needs of the audience. From that, all else follows.
The actual indices of this will be directly measurable in consistent viewership and promotion patterns, but what those things are truly measuring is how good you are at knowing your readers and giving them what they want, it's as simple as that.
It's not enough to just look at comments, or just look at views, because different things can generate commentary feedback or a large influx of readership without necessarily pointing to true success at the fundamentals of blogging. You need sustained readership by meeting people's needs in order to have a blog that has longevity and predictable expectations of growth.
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