You primary audience members for this podcast are very important to me, and I want you to know that. For all that I insist on doing readings of all kinds of weird stuff just because I feel like it, I really appreciate the fact that y'all download files and stay subscribed. You keep me going.
However, I thought I might show you some of the stats off archive.org, so you can see how the "long tail" works. Keeping the audiobooks archived in a public site like archive.org allows people to discover and use the podcast at any time. I also tallied up the numbers of downloads back at the end of November and put them in parentheses next to the current numbers. You will see that we've had a bit of growth since then, though usually nothing dramatic. "New" just means it had no number ranking in November.
My Personal Top 20 as of March 31, 2006:
1. Dunsany, "The Sword of Welleran" – 113 (102)
2. Freeman, "The Blue Sequin" – 101 (93)
3. Freeman, "A Message from the Deep Sea" – 94 (79) was 8th
3. Dunsany, Fifty-One Tales, Part 1 – 94
4. O'Brien, "The Dragon Fang Possessed by the Conjuror Piou-Lu" – 88 (79) was 3rd
5. Pope Benedict XVI, "Deus Caritas Est" – 87 (new)
6. Dryden, "Annus Mirabilis" – 78 (67) was 4th
7. Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" – 76 (56) was 7th
8. Tennyson, "Locksley Hall"/"Locksley Hall Sixty Years After" – 76 (58) was 6th
9. Freeman, The Red Thumb-Mark, "Part 1" – 71 (59) was 5th
10. Freeman, The Red Thumb-Mark, "Part 5" – 68 (33) was 16th
11. O'Brien, "A Terrible Night" – 66 (46) was 12th
12. Chesterton, "The Nightmare" – 63 (46)
13. O'Brien, "The Man without a Shadow – A New Version" – 62 (49) was 11th
14. a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book 1, Part 1 – 61 (new)
15. Burke, "Speech on Conciliation with America" – 60 (new)
15. Hilton, "Of the Song of Angels" – 60 (50) was 10th
16. O'Brien, "Jubal the Ringer" – 59 (51) was 9th
17. Dunsany, "The Hoard of the Gibbelins" – 58
18. O'Brien, "What Was It? – A Mystery" – 47 (43) was 13th
19. Riley, "Little Orphant Annie" – 53 (46) was 12th
20. Freeman, The Red Thumb-Mark, Part 2 – 42 (37) was 14th
Just in case you're interested, here are the next 20:
21. Locke, "A Christmas Mystery – The Story of Three Wise Men" – 38
22. "The Didache" – 37 (30) was 17th
22. Folk Tales of Napoleon – 37 (35) was 15th
22. Van Dyke, "The First Christmas Tree" – 37
22. Browning, "Love Among the Ruins" – 37
23. St Ignatius, "Epistle to the Romans" – 35 (30) was 17th
23. Scott, The Bridal of Triermain – 35 (29) was 18th
23. Surtees, Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour, Part 1 – 35
24. St. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, Part 1 – 34 (28) was 19th
25. Surtees, Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour, Part 2 – 32
26. St. Bede, "Sermon for All Saints' Day" – 30
27. Peattie, "Two Pioneers" – 29 (26) was 20th
27. Freeman, The Red Thumb-Mark, Part 3 – 29
28. Saki, "Sredni Vashtar" – 27
28. Burns, "Halloween" – 27
28. O'Brien, "The Wondersmith", Pt 1 – 27
28. Dunsany, Fifty-One Tales, Part 2 – 27
29. St. Justin Martyr, "The First Apologia" – 26
30. The Rosary – 25
You'll notice that I got a lot more downloads from the more fun stuff than from the dry. This is no surprise, of course. What I need to do is figure out, though, is how to make the dry stuff sound more appealing to people. A good summary is worth a lot of downloads.
I should also point out that some of the stats may be misleading. What does it mean if I got 94 downloads of the first part of Dunsany's Fifty-One Tales? Hard to say, with 17 separate files included.
