John Scalzi moves the goalposts in trying to hide the decline:
What’s this? It’s the traffic graph for all the parts of Scalzi.com that are not part of the current iteration of Whatever, i.e., archives and other bits and pieces that continue to be linked into from around the Web and Internet. The part of the site you’re reading now (the current iteration of Whatever), has statistics information provided by WordPress and Google Analytics. Everything else has its stat information recorded by the 1&1 Site Analytics. There’s surprisingly little overlap in recording between the two stats packages. Last year the WordPress stats package recorded 7.57 million visits; the 1&1 stats package recorded 6.13 million. The former set of stats are mirrored inexactly by Google Analytics; the latter, not at all.
I note this because occasionally I see someone who is not me purport to speak with authority about how many visits the site gets. However, as the total universe of visits the site gets is not publicly accessible, if someone who is not me is making that claim, they literally do not know what they are talking about. Not because they are obtuse or dishonest (or at least not just), but simply because they don’t have all the information about the traffic coming into the site — the entire site.
(If I am making the claim, mind you, I generally note all sorts of caveats about the numbers. If several years of looking at stats has shown me anything, it’s that the numbers are fairly fungible, shall we say.)
The moral of the story: Beware people who are not me! At least, as far as the stats to this site are concerned.
Let’s see here. Little Johnny bragged about his 8 MILLION VIEWS in 2012. He wrote: “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.”
Keep in mind that these were the numbers he previously reported for Whatever:
2009: 4,488, 281
2010: 5,131,194
2011: 5,409,015
2012: 8,000,000
Now notice that he’s openly admitting that he had 7.57 million WordPress visits for Whatever in 2013. Where have we seen that number before? Ah, yes, in the chart I posted on January 1, 2014. And notice, too, that I specifically labeled those 7.57 million views as Whatever visits; in Google Analytics terms they were closer to 7.52 million. In any case, Johnny is trying to obscure the fact that the numbers I reported for Whatever were precisely accurate. Instead of calling my account into question, all he’s managed to do is to confirm my veracity. Not only do I know what I am talking about, (which was never anything but Whatever, the Very Important Blog that was supposed to be ever so vastly popular), but my numbers were dead-on accurate.
Now Johnny is belatedly bringing in non-Whatever traffic after five years of ignoring it to attempt to obscure the fact that my blogs have surpassed his blog, and he’s doing so in a characteristically deceptive manner. There may well be “surprisingly little overlap”, but of course, Johnny doesn’t say if that overlap is 10 percent or 40 percent. As usual, he’s hiding information and frantically spinning the information he can’t hide in order to try to make himself look better. It’s all rather desperate.
And it’s pointless anyhow. Even if there were no overlap at all, even if we accept his moving of the goalposts, and even if we ignore the fact that WordPress visits are slightly exaggerated in comparison with Google Analytics pageviews, at 13.7 million for Maximum McRapey to 13.1 million for VP and AG alone in 2013, the fact is that I’ve already passed him up in 2014. That’s because in January, he was down 30 percent year-on-year from 2013, while my two blogs were up 24 percent. He’s on an annual rate towards 5.3M Whatever / 9.6M Max Total while I’m on an annual rate towards 16.2M VP+AG combined.
Johnny is in observable decline and he knows it; despite trying one new stunt after another, he still hasn’t written anything as good as his Heinlein rip-off published seven years ago. It won’t be long before the ever-ravenous left-wing forces he fanned for years will begin devouring him in envy now that he’s finally received his unmerited Participation Hugo. I don’t care about such things, but those shambling shoggoths sure as hell do!
In any event, the fact is that there is overlap between the two components of the 13.7 million and Johnny refused to specify how much overlap there is tells you all you need to know about his long-delayed honesty. Either way, his fraud has been exposed, the numbers that I reported are now confirmed to be very accurate, and if you still take the chubby little neurotic seriously, well, you probably aren’t tall enough for this ride.
John Scalzi has never learned that if you simply tell the truth, you never have to worry about anyone finding out that you are a fraud. He could have ended all of this nonsense by simply putting up a public Sitemeter or Google Analytics counter, but then, doing so would have demolished the myth of popularity that he has so carefully constructed over the years.