McRapey never stops stretching the facts in the interests of self-promotion.
John Scalzi @scalzi 3:33 PM – 10 Aug 13
@gregpak I think if people like the content they will keep coming in regardless. I mean, my site gets 50K readers a day
I find this amusing because it is so perfectly in lack of character. The fact is that John Scalzi’s site doesn’t get 50k readers a day. It doesn’t even get 50k pageviews per day. McRapey is exaggerating his daily readers by a factor between 10 and 25. This is mathematically obvious because last year he was celebrating 8 million WordPress pageviews in 2012, which works out to 20,822 Google pageviews per day. However, most sites run around 4 pageviews per reader, which means that, at most, McRapey’s site averages 5,205 readers per day. And if the level of engagement is higher than average there, as is the case here, then the actual number of average daily readers could be as low as 2,000.
By doubling his actual pageviews and then swapping “reader” for “pageview”, McRapey tries to make his site look considerably more popular and influential than it is. This sort of bait-and-switch is typical for the Left and it isn’t new for McRapey. I recall that the very first time he came to my attention, he was bragging about his vast knowledge of science fiction based, in part, on “Four science fiction novels sold” at a time when he only had one “conventionally published”. I correctly had him pegged for a bullshit artist from the very start.
If I were to exaggerate on a similar scale, I could claim 75k readers a day for my sites. But I don’t. Because there aren’t.
UPDATE: It turns out this isn’t the first time McRapey has lied about his blog traffic. In this 2012 tweet, he even makes it clear that his 50k claim refers only to average daily blog readers, not pageviews or one-time maximums, and it is a claim that happens to be completely, utterly, and provably false.
John Scalzi @scalzi 6:20 AM – 4 Dec 12
Hey, authors of non-traditionally published books! Promote your book to my 50K daily blog readers TODAY: http://bit.ly/TzNsdl
I invite McRapey to come clean about his ludicrous exaggerations and do what I and many other honest bloggers do. Just put up a link that allows your readers to see exactly what your real daily readers are and stop blatantly lying about how many of them there are.
UPDATE II: McRapey wrote: “Bear in mind that I don’t generally lie for the sake of lying. That’s really stupid, and I’m not that
good of a liar. Most things aren’t worth lying about, and as a rule I
do try to live my life in a manner so that lying isn’t something I have
to do a lot of.”
One has to admire the calculated preparatory spin. McRapey doesn’t lie for the sake of lying, he lies whenever he thinks it suits his interests and he can get away with it. Scalzi lies frequently and he lies shamelessly. He often lies about very stupid things. The man is a gifted self-promoter, and one of the things that makes him so good at self-promotion is his complete lack of honesty or integrity.
And that is probably what lies at the heart of our contempt for each other.