This morning I noticed that I’m approaching one million words. I have a widget that counts posts, words, comments and so forth. I’ve never paid much attention to the total word count until I noticed the odometer was about to turn over somewhere in the next post.

Allegedly the word count excludes the quoted texts from links, so those million words are all mine. That sounds like a lot, but the math says it is roughly 700 words per day. I don’t post every day, but I often post more than one thing in a day.

This is the officially the millionth word: Hurray!

I try to keep my essays at the 1000 word length on the theory that most people have the attention span of a gnat. The internet has damaged our brains, making long pieces unreadable. I still read long form essays, but I do so in stages. I’ll read a chunk and then put it aside and then read another chunk. Part of it is the medium, but like everyone, my attention span has shrunk thanks to the internet.

Looking through the activity logs, it appears I have about 25,000 regular readers. There’s a gizmo on the site to tell me how many non-robot visitors I get every day, week, month and so on. I never look at it as I’m not running a storefront. If I ever tried to make money from this, then maybe it would mean something to me. As it stands, I have 25,000 readers who come by multiple times a month.

I’m a little surprised by the number as I have done nothing to promote the blog. The readership is entirely word of mouth. Most of that mouth is Gerard Van der Leun from American Digest. I also get a ton of traffic from Maggies Farm. Both are great sites by the way. Doug Ross also sends a lot of people my way. There are others, of course, but those are the top three referrers.

I get most visits from US readers, but number two on the hit parade is Britain. Someone sent me a message claiming to be a UK based reader and thanking me for my efforts. They said they have to read US sites for this type of content as it is largely banned in Europe. Strangely, I get very little Canadian traffic. Maybe they have enough domestically produced vitriol and bile. Maybe they are too drunk to work the internets.

As has been pointed out, I’m starting to cast a shadow. My Overton Window bit with regards to trump turned up in a lot of gentile places, suggesting some good thinkers are slumming it with the bad thinkers like me. That makes this site like the slave quarters in the bad old days. Instead of coming here for the hootenanny, the beautiful people come to the ghetto for ideas and insights. Z is the new black!

Anyway, thank you to all the folks who spread the good news and thank you for being a reader. I appreciate it greatly. After the revolution, your contributions will be noted.