John Scalzi is understandably pleased by Whatever’s 8 million views in 2012.
Just passed the number. Thanks to Hacker News for the assist; someone there linked to “A Self-Made Man Looks at How He Made It,” sending a flood of programmers over to read it. You can follow their own discussion of the article here. I’ll note again that this is just the views recorded by WordPress’ software; the actual number of views is higher. I’ll have a full report early in 2013. But still: 8 million views. It doesn’t suck. Thank you.
He is, of course, welcome, as a few of them came from various posts here. Eight million is a certainly a lot of pageviews. It is an impressive number and clearly there must be a lot of Rabbit People who are fascinated by what McRapey has to say about life, the universe, and everything, or are at least interested in currying favor with the current president of the SFWA. It will be interesting to see if his traffic continues to increase once he steps down from office.
What I found most interesting was his post about Whatever’s views from previous years:
2009: 4,488, 281
2010: 5,131,194
2011: 5,409,015
2012: 8,000,000
Here is why I found it interesting about those numbers. The combined Sitemeter pageviews for Vox Popoli and Alpha Game for 2012 were 5,023,130. (Sitemeter visits were 3,412,014).
2008: 2,713,293
2009: 3,396,001 +25.2%
2010: 3,713,218 +9.3%
2011: 4,463,247 +20.2%
2012: 5,023,130 +12.5%
Is it credible that the readership for VP+AG is actually that close to the Whatever readership? No, I don’t think so. I think Scalzi is using the term “view” improperly and should be using “visit”. Since, like many other bloggers, he elects to hide his statistics rather than permitting Sitemeter or some other service to display them openly, it’s difficult to compare apples to apples here. Clearly some sort of scientific experiment is in order, which will require me to become president of the SFWA as well as the author of a NYT best-selling science fiction novel derived from a cancelled television show. Does anyone have any ideas? I’m thinking either ALF or CHiPs.
For what it’s worth, Alexa has scalzi.com, which hosts Whatever, at 12,996 in the USA. Vox Popoli is 29,426. Alpha Game is 73,183. Which makes it very clear that in the grand scheme of things, we are all more or less irrelevant.
