Hey folks! I had planned to do a Fireside for this week with a sort of 'year-in-review' musing, but between the holidays and the whole pedant household coming down with a nasty cold, I'm a bit short of the time and energy to put together a full fireside with recommendations. Instead, I'll offer this brief end-of-year reflection as the year closes and we'll be back next week in a whole new year.
But I won't leave you without a cat picture.
2023 was the first year that ACOUP's average view-count didn't go up. As WordPress reads the statistics, ACOUP in 2023 had 3.63m page views (Google Analytics records a somewhat lower figure of 3.3m), compared to 4.12m in 2022, a modest decrease, though still higher than 2021's 2.8m. I used to benchmark this project's level of public engagement against that of Eidolon (2015-2020) which had a five-year run of c. 2m views, so while 3.3m views is lower than last year it is still quite high for a public scholarship project. It is also approximately 3.25m more views than I ever hoped to get when we started. In terms of readers, the average monthly reader count via WordPress is around 80,000 for 2023, down from almost 100,000 in 2023, but up compared to the c. 60,000 for 2021.
As for why readership was a touch lower, I have a few theories. I think the most obvious thing to fault is the continued decline of Twitter and indeed, despite my rising Twitter follower count, actual visits from Twitter have declined by about a third. I don't think that's the whole story though. Looking at the posts for the year, what strikes is not that the average post is less read, but the absence of really big splashes. Part of that is probably a product of Twitter's decline too, but also the topics we discussed and the year. A lot of traffic in 2022 was driven by Ukraine-related news and the military primers, which was less pressing in the news this year (though no less pressing on the actual battlefield). At the same time, some of this year's topics - a lot of civic governance - were clearly more niche compared to previous years.
I'd also say, looking at the statistics, I can probably blame Amazon for some of my reduced traffic, because of how disappointing Rings of Power was. While the "Nitpicks of Power" series came out this year (and was thus shiny, fresh and new) it was actually outperformed in views this year by "The Siege of Gondor" and "The Battle of Helm's Deep," series that are three and four years old respectively. I think that speaks to the degree to which Rings largely sunk in the Anduin of the public's consciousness - hopefully never to be retrieved (alas, I am told a second season is in production; may it be better than the first season, it can hardly be worse) - but of course that limits interest in probing its failures for interesting historical insights.
Finally, I think another factor was simply that I had a bit less time for this project this year than in some previous years. Instead, this year was dominated by the successful effort to get my book project a book contract (which of course patrons over at Patreon got the blow-by-blow of), as well as welcoming a little human addition to our pedant family - both things which will tend to demand considerable time and attention. But that of course has an impact on the posts, which were a bit less developed this year in general, with fewer images and which tended to be more narrowly historical (e.g. the series on civic governance, which I quite like) to save time working through pop-culture parallels. I think the result was perfectly fine and serviceable, but life is a matter of tradeoffs.
That said, the modest drop in readership hasn't been matched by a drop in support for the project. At the start of this year, ACOUP had about 800 amici over on Patreon and an appropriate c. 300 patres et matres conscripti in the ACOUP Senate; both figures are up by about a hundred now year-on-year. All told then, I think this was a year where it seems the core readership on the project was quite happy, but we didn't reach as widely beyond them as we had in previous years, for a mix of reasons. That's fine by me; I do not think every venture in life must be eternally in a state of growth - sometimes it is fine to simply develop a sustainable, productive and useful niche and then serve that niche.
This year did see some of my writing outside of ACOUP reach larger audiences however. In April, my essay in the New York Times, "Colleges Should Be More Than Just Vocational Schools" came out, initially online but evidently it gathered enough interest to be included in the print edition, which was a fun and unexpected treat. Then in July, my essay in Foreign Policy, the provocatively titled "Spartans Were Losers" - a compressed version of the This. Is. Not. Sparta. series - made a substantial splash as well, triggering a lot of debate on social media. My hope is that some of the points I made manage to plant themselves in the institutional culture of the U.S. military, which was the 'target' for the essay (thus the venue).
In any case, we're going to keep on keeping on. My plan for the next few weeks is a few more 'weapon studies' in line with our treatment of the Mediterranean 'Omni-Spear' - in particular, I'm plotting a brief history of the gladius - probably alongside a Rogue Trader-inspired look at military adventurers, private enterprize war and charter companies. I also need to actually post the ACOUP-Senate poll I've been meaning to for ::checks notes:: oh, about three months. Perhaps unsurprisingly, topics picked by the ACOUP-Senate tend to be popular.
So that is it for 2023 and I will see you all in 2024.
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