The blog has reached 5 million views

I’m overwhelmed.

The blog has reached 5 million views.

Even if, for the last couple of years, it wasn’t as active as it used to be, it kept on growing, reaching more and more readers in Lebanon and across the world.

Such a success is rather unexpected.

My Beirut Chronicles is not a mainstream media, covering a wide range of local or world current affairs. It’s not an entertainment blog, fashion or food blog, with an obvious popular appeal. It’s only the writing of one individual, expressing his opinions.

I never paid a penny to promote it on social media. It grew “organically”, which means it solely grew by word of mouth.

I never wrote “pleasing” posts to attract as many people as possible. I often went against the mainstream current, and made lots of ennemies along the way. I got harassed on social media, insulted, defamed, threatened, and even banned from working in some media, in Lebanon and elsewhere. Friends unfriended me, and some people went as far as expressing their will to organize a public burning of my books.

Maybe Gustave Flaubert was right when he wrote: “You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.”

Anyway, enough with the haters and the party poopers!

The blog’s success, I owe it to you.

It all started with you. You liked, you shared, you debated, you agreed, you disagreed, you made it what it is. And gave me the most beautiful gift a writer can hope for.

So thank you, thank you, thank you.