To mark the fifth birthday of Culture Snob (and the second day of the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon), some raw data and some calculations:
- In five years, Culture Snob has produced 514 entries, 36 polls, and 17 commentary tracks – nine full-movie commentaries and eight of the five-minute variety. I have written roughly 450,000 words for the site – an average of about 250 a day, or enough to fill 1,800 double-spaced typed pages over the site’s life.
- I typically write 500 polished-draft words an hour (for a total of 900 hours) and spend a couple hours revising each longer piece (650 hours). That means I’ve given more than two months of my life writing Culture Snob. Put differently, I’ve spent 3.5 percent of my life over the past five years composing and editing words for this site. Add a minimum of 400 hours watching the movies I’ve written about, and we’ve reached 81.25 days of my life – or 4.5 percent of my life over the past half-decade.
- Another way to look at it: Watching, writing, and editing for Culture Snob has eaten up the equivalent of nearly 49 40-hour work weeks over the past five years. And it’s a hobby.
- July 2005 was a fallow month, with only one entry. September 2003 was active in terms of posts (20), but much of it was old stuff previously published elsewhere. August 2006 is my most honestly productive month, with 17 entries.
- The number of monthly unique Culture Snob visitors had settled at around 3,600 from February through May 2008. It jumped to 5,114 in June, thanks mostly to a search engine that started sending people my way who entered maddeningly vague search terms. (For example: “archive.”) I guess Culture Snob is their punishment, an incentive to refine their searches.
- More search-engine fun: Some people found Culture Snob by searching for “shit movies” (55 times since February 2007), “fuck movies” (20 times), and “rape movie” (17 times). They found, respectively, this, this, and this. Sorry to disappoint you, folks!
- Two-thirds of Culture Snob readers access the site from the United States.
- Roughly 115 people subscribe to Culture Snob RSS feeds, and 24 receive e-mail updates.
- This is (to put it mildly) a modest-sized audience. The popular sports blog Deadspin – which turns three years old in September – gets more than 250,000 visits per day.
- As of 11:30 a.m. on July 10, Culture Snob’s Technorati authority stands at 24, with 324 links – also attractively modest.
