I just happen to enjoy reading the educated fringes available throughout the blogosphere. Since I started opening up my browser to the more alternative, nuanced, reactionary, and what I might call the unusually highly analytical and skeptical mainstreamers my mind continues to be blown. And (regretfully) I have a degree in political science: the fringe should not be so alien to me. Not only that, but I used to blog a lot a few years back; why did I not know of these blogs and/or viewpoints? Perhaps my mind was closed; or through cruel fate I was denied the addictive mind blowings. You cannot help but ask, what are we missing out on today? (And no, the sites to which I'm referring are not conspiracy oriented nor bigoted--although some, sometimes closely approach those boundaries. They would have to on occasion I would imagine, or they wouldn't be so interesting.) I digress.
Apparently sci-fi/fantasy writer Mr. Vox Day (Beale), has a grievance against a Mr. John Scalzi (another sci-fi/fantasy writer--although that is apparently debatable). Mr. Scalzi is allegedly, if not self-admittedly, a rapist. I don't really care about any of that. It's just obligatory background for you, precious reader. Furthermore, Mr. Scalzi it appears, had a hand in ousting Mr. Beale from the SFWA. Now since I'm getting this all from Mr. Beale, my information is one-sided. Since I don't care, I'm fine with that. I read for entertainment and enlightenment--all the personal disputes in the world easily fit in the former category.
So before I commit the sin of verbosity, shall we get down to what inspired this random detective work?
Apparently Mr. Scalzi brags about having 50k readers a day on his blog. That appears to be a big fat lie. Like most self-promoting douchebags, exaggeration and lying are as essential as oxygen. Sorry to cut you off Mr. Beale, but I'll take whatever motivation to blog I can find, however spiteful, pointless, or childish.
This is what I found looking into Mr. Scalzi's blog traffic:
From Compete.com:
As you can see, only once in the last year did he even come near 50k readers, in a month. If you take the monthly uniques from this you can extrapolate the average daily uniques. On July 20th it counted 22,096. Divide that by 30 and you get 737. I wouldn't mind having that many readers, but I don't think I would tell a blantantly discoverable lie about it.
How about a second opinion? From TrafficEstimate.com:
Note that it only displays visits per month, not unique visits. As it disclaims in small print, "the number of visits differs from visitors." One visitor (or unique visit) may refresh the page multiple times, resulting in larger numbers of visits or pageviews vs. visitors. That said, according to this, Scalzi is averaging 7523 visits (pageviews) per day.
To be fair, these may not be totally accurate, so I will link the most generous traffic analysis of Scalzi's site I found. From Quantcast.com:
From Quantcast we get a closer look. He's averaging approximately 6027 unique visitors per day (last month's uniques divided by 30). Unless you count every unique visit as 8 and a half readers, this is much more than the occasionally excusable exaggeration. Even for self-promoting douchebags.
Did I mention I don't care. I care only to the extent I needed something to blog about to get over my procrastination/blogger's block. This seemed to work. More (hopefully interesting stuff) to come.
