A Word about the Numbers
As Mark Twain said, there are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. Personally, I’m a big believer in honest reporting of numbers, for good or ill. Because to that, I wanted to explain a little about how the numbers you see on the site are calculated.
On the home page, we list the number of active subscribers. Why active and not total? Because every site on the web has loads of folks who sign up and then never use the services. We wanted to show the total of folks actually using the service — not artificially inflate our user numbers by adding non-active users into the stats. The active subscriber count is a total of all the registered users who have downloaded something via a subscription RSS feed in the last 30 days.
The number of downloads is a simple total of all the files that have been downloaded at least once from the site by a user for a given chapter. It’s a distinct count, which means that if the user tried to downloaded it more than once, we only count it as one download. It’s a count of unique downloads, so we don’t artificially inflate the numbers with multiples.
Here is our site stats report for users and subscriptions at the time of this writing:
Total Members: 22018
Active Members: 5306
New Members: 337
Total Subscriptions: 111192
Active Subscriptions: 12691
New subscriptions : 1997
Completed Subscriptions: 50786
Cancelled Subscriptions: 11536
Limbo Subscriptions: 33523
Pseudo Subscriptions: 11750
New items are within the last 7 days.
Active are within the last 30 days.
Completed subscriptions are subscriptions where folks have finished the book they were subscribed to.
Cancelled subscriptions are subscriptions that the user has manually terminated the subscription.
Limbo subscriptions are subscriptions that have not been cancelled, but have not been downloaded in the last 30 days.
Pseudo subscriptions are subscriptions that have never downloaded an episodes.
We want to be upfront with folks at all times about this stuff, so if you have any questions, please drop us a line.
January 1st, 2007 at 11:02 pm
Hmmm… I don’t use an RSS feed to get the chapters. I just download them straight from the site. Does that mean I’m off the radar?
January 5th, 2007 at 10:25 am
I’d be very interested in some hints about the payments. I mean, not total number recieved or something, but how many percent actually donates and in which categories do they fall? (Like $1-$10, $11-$50, you know.) Any chance on numbers about that?
January 6th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Benjamin Disraeli, not Mark Twain.