Reality-Based Community readership has soared this year
RBC readership has grown by leaps and bounds this year with the addition of some new bloggers, more posts, and better web linking work thanks to Steve Davenport (i.e., Getting us into Google News).
At the end of September, I had a joke post to cause and to note our first month of breaking 150,000 visits. That was a milestone, as were the 242k page views for the month.
But by November, monthly pageviews had risen to 371k! Part of this no doubt was a surge in the week before the election, but to compare month-to-month, we have already had more page views this month than we did in all of December of last year.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, this probably means that we get as many readers a year as the Daily Mail and HuffPo get every five minutes, but it is nonetheless gratifying that there is apparently a growing appetite for public policy analysis and civil debate by a team of bloggers and a cadre of intelligent commenters.
Onward!
Author: Keith Humphreys
Keith Humphreys is the Esther Ting Memorial Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University and an Honorary Professor of Psychiatry at Kings College London. His research, teaching and writing have focused on addictive disorders, self-help organizations (e.g., breast cancer support groups, Alcoholics Anonymous), evaluation research methods, and public policy related to health care, mental illness, veterans, drugs, crime and correctional systems. Professor Humphreys' over 300 scholarly articles, monographs and books have been cited over thirteen thousand times by scientific colleagues. He is a regular contributor to Washington Post and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian (UK), The Telegraph (UK), Times Higher Education (UK), Crossbow (UK) and other media outlets.
View all posts by Keith Humphreys
First!
C’mon, I was really proud of this placement! At the top of the comments section in a post praising the RBC community as a whole as well as the intelligence of the commenters? At least I made myself laugh. 🙂
Long live the RBC.
Much appreciated — thanks!
Well done! I make a point of visiting RBC every day, and spreading the good word.
Me, too.
Well, I do like the level of discourse here.
This might be a strange thing to say about the Internet, which is supposed to free us from the physical constraints of reality, or sort of, but I do think growth can ruin a website. You can get too many of the wrong sort of commenters, and/or, bad management of a large number of right sort. I hope it doesn’t happen here.
I am responsible for 157,654 visits last month!
Say “Hi!” to the visitors from the US Senate and US Dept of Justice. 🙂
Hi, visitors!
When my liberal friends send me links from the standard left leaning websites and their mindless babbling of ipsedixitisms, I point them here where I go to get intelligent points from the other side — even if Professor Kleiman’s bottomless bag of snide comments make me grind my teeth. It does provide a salutary perspective.