@adamprocter, this reminds me of Bill Ferriter's questions about audience and Harold Jarche's discussion of metrics. I very rarely look at my analytics. What I do is for me firstly, that others may benefit is a bonus of the open web. As Maha Bali points out:

I first fell in love with the web or the open aspect of the web when I was trying to finish my PhD during a time where Egypt had a lot of political conflict and I was unable to leave the house because I had a young child and the library at my institution was closed. I needed some resources, and even though I had access to some online resources, I actually needed some paper based resources that did not exist for free online, and at the time, what I fell in love with was green open access stuff that was placed on repositories, and honestly pirated stuff, that was placed online so that I had some access to some articles and book chapters that I wouldn’t normally be able to access from home. And it was that transformative moment for me where I decided that if I publish things, I would like as much as possible for the things that I publish to be openly accessible to other people.

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