The Christmas miracle

 

As I may have mentioned, I am not good at marketing. Indeed, I am so profoundly bad at it that I am immune from the accidental virtue of "being so bad at it I'm good".

And that's okay.

Partly it's okay because while marketing isn't necessarily, or by its very nature, worthless and evil, its overdeveloped primacy in a late capitalist system makes it unkillable, like a runaway fungus, and as such it is literally 

GOING TO DESTROY THE WORLD AND EVERYONE YOU KNOW IN IT!

So, I mean, at least I won't be responsible for that, even if the price of my absolution is to have never had more than eight committed readers of my life's work at any given time.

IT'S A PRICE I'M WILLING TO PAY!

Although honestly, it wasn't really up to me.

But even though I'm not into marketing except in making doomed, deranged spasms at it, I am not averse to statistical analysis of the reach of my creative output. 

Like, for instance, I was thinking I might not want to put anything too excellent up on clerkmanifesto because it is Christmas Day, and, I assume, no one reads clerkmanifesto on Christmas Day.

But is that true?

I decided to check.

I checked.

There have been eleven previous Christmas Day posts here.

I probably like the cat one best of all of them. It was called "Old Friends", and was from Christmas, 2015. It had 89 views. I don't link it here for your convenience because we are strictly interested in hard numbers here. You looking at it will only mess up our stats!

Other counts for Christmas posts are 53, 37, 53(again!), 84, 178, 91, 115, and 256

The most views on any of my posts was for the post the year before the cat one, on Christmas 2014, that had a whopping 501 views. 

Picture, say, a large ballroom filled with 501 people. That's pretty many readers! And if some of those readers are actually cardboard cutouts of people, or possibly just me, over and over, what of it? 

Remember, we have eschewed fame here so as not to contribute to your death.

My least views on any Christmas Day post so far is for this post, from the Christmas of 2023, my twelfth Christmas Post. It is also the least views I have had for any post ever out of 4,044 posts!

No one has read this yet, not even me, though I have read significant parts of it. 

Actually you have read significant parts of it too.

I think we can ascribe much of its low readership to people's lack of interest in statistics. 

Although possibly it is down to my original suspicion- Christmas Day is not a time when people read a lot on the Internet. 

But if we're really going to get scientific about it, the reason for the phenomenally low readership simply has to be that the numbers of readers for this column are so low, lower than any other posting in the history of the Internet, simply because I haven't even finished writing it yet.

Although, 

how can that ever explain you?