Saturday, October 31, 2009

Reaching Out To .006%


I was just reading Ian Aspin's blog ReallyGoodThinking – I go there a lot because Ian is a very talented fellow who makes me think.


After reading today's piece – I started thinking about who is really reading headstuffing. Who am I reaching?


Headstuffing, from the emails that I get, and the comments left, and from what my friends tell me when I see them, is read pretty much by people of all types.


That's pretty cool.


All though the younger crowd doesn't really get me.


That's pretty cool too.


But I like to try to bring everything down to one common denominator. So I spent a lot of time thinking what are the most two most common characteristics of people who enjoy my little ramblings?


After a lot of thought – too much really, because I am very busy and should be putting my amazing thinking powers to more immediate concerns right now like raking the back yard leaves or finally putting the new door knob on the garage door (there's a big hole there now and I have to move a chair in front to keep the stupid door closed), or hanging the Halloween decorations for tonight's festivities! – I finally came down to my two lowest common denominators of who reads headstuffing:


They have to be able to read the English language - or at least my impression of what I think the English language is.


And they have to be able to use the Internet to get to headstuffing.


Okay, that's three lowest common denominators.


Then it struck me. There are roughly somewhere between eight and ten billion people on the planet earth right now. Of those eight to ten billion people, how many are literate, English reading Internet users?


Being one myself, I thought I would find out like all literate English reading Internet users learn research stuff now-a-days.


I'll Google it.


I typed in this simple question to the Google search bar:


"How many internet users speak English?"


I figure if you're using the internet you most likely can read – otherwise the web browser is pretty useless … right?


The answer came up on the first selection.

464 million. That's a lot.

But out of say … 10 billion? That's only 5% of the Earth's population?

That's not very many.


Over the course of three years of writing headstuffing, my Google Analytics account tells me I have had about 250,000 unique visitors.


So that's only .006% percent of the total potential persons -people that I can reach?


That's not very good.

But it's pretty close to the percentage of people that I know that think like I do.


Headstuffing would likely touch a lot more people that think like me if I could publish it in different language. According to the chart, 251 million Internet users read in Chinese.


Hmmm. Would the Chinese get me?


I work with a lot of Chinese people at the office. We get along really well … I think – I can't really understand what they are saying when they talk amongst themselves. I doubt I ever actually come up in conversation.


So I called up one of my colleagues at home – Lo Hi. I think he was still sleeping.


"What you want Brill?"


"Hi Lo, I was wondering if you had ever read my headstuffing blog?"


"You woke me up to ask me stupid question like that?"


"I'm doing research actually, sorry I woke you", I apologized. "I'll make sure I credit you in the post with your answer."


"Yeah, I read that stupid blog one time. You not very funny Brill!", and he hung up.


So, I guess that's not the answer I was hoping for.


That makes sense though, Lo never laughs at my jokes in development meetings.


So I guess that unless I either change my sense of humor, or I learn to speak, then write in another language, I am going to be stuck with reaching only .006% of the entire English speaking Internet community.


Which is ok I guess.

1 comment:

Bettina said...

We read it too Brill!!!!! B&B Miami

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