2016 Statistics!
AMBER LOVE I’ve examined the Vodka O’Clock podcast downloads from Hipcast and the AmberUnmasked.com page views as best as I can. I don’t have any great reporting tools. For example, if I choose “Year” summaries in WordPress, that gives today and a year prior; it doesn’t allow me to customize the dates to actually be 2016. Book sales are another area I tried to analyze but had some technical issues there as well.
PODCAST STATS:
This wasn’t as fun as I thought. As far as page views goes, show notes for Vodka O’Clock barely squeaked into the Top 100 of pages; the one that made #95 was Vodka O’Clock 1602 with Dese’Rae talking about suicidology and her photography work to tell the stories of survivors.
The stats for HipCast are only the calculations for iTunes and Stitcher. Listeners can directly play episodes through AmberUnmasked.com so those clicks are not counted unfortunately. Below are some tallies for the HipCast feed stats.
I broke the episodes into some themes. The main issue with that is I tend to discuss health and intersectional feminism in most of the shows even if they are about comics. If it was specifically a comics creator, I labeled the episode “comics/cartoooning” not “feminism.”
I also examined what I could reasonably guess as gender identification of the guests or public speakers; this is obviously a place where there’s room for error basing data on assumptions.
As far as HipCast plays and downloads go which have nothing to do with whether listeners viewed the show notes, the episodes ranked as follows:
- Ep 1611: Javier Cruz Winnick
- Ep 1612: Starwolf
- Ep 1601: Josh Stallings
- Ep 1607: Karl Slominski
- Ep 1618: Creating Queer Characters
- Ep 1604: Amanda Chatel
- Ep 1623: Jolene Haley & Brian LeTendre
- Ep 1603: (video blog) Pay to Play
- Ep 1620: David Wolinksy
- Ep 1609: Ben Cohen
- Ep 1602: Suicidology with Dese’Rae Lestage
- Ep 1617: Artists with Disabilities from GSCF2016
- Ep 1616: Paul Allor
- Ep 1614: Josh, (JK) & Amber on Psych
- Ep 1621: Howie Noel
- Ep 1605: Joy Taney
- Ep 1622: Eric Grissom & Claire Connelly
- Ep 1619: Jesse Parrino
- Ep 1610: Steve Bryant
- Ep 1606: Amanda Jade
- Ep 1608: Adam Christopher
- Ep 1613: Poe and Madness at Steampunk World’s Fair
- Ep 1624: Daniel Strickland
- Ep 1625: Josh and Amber’s 2016 Favorites
- Ep 1615: Steampunk World’s Fair “Occult in America”
It’s worth pointing out that it’s not fair to judge the downloads this way and here’s why: shows that haven’t been available as long, such as shows of the last quarter of the year, usually aren’t going to have as many playbacks as shows from earlier in the year. It’s therefore noteworthy that episodes 1623 and 1620 broke the Top 10 regardless of being posted in the latter part of the year.
PAGES OF INTEREST:
TOP 5 COSPLAY PAGES
At least not all the hits and views went to sexy photos (most did). Five cosplay tutorials were in the Top 20 of pages viewed.
As I said, most of the top pages were somehow porn-related — either promotional photos of videos available or myself ranging from PG13 to XXX. A few pages where I raged about having an appropriate time and place for adult entertainment were also popular in 2016.
BOOK SALES:
PRINTED BOOKS:
I sold three times as many copies of Cardiac Arrest (Farrah Wethers book 1) compared to Full Body Manslaughter (book 2).
Unfortunately, Kindle sales reports only allow you to go back 3 months. I hadn’t realized that when it came time to run reports. I figured, why of course they’ll have a variety of cumulative data! – haha, was I wrong. Their reports suck. Needless to say, I do not have January Kindle data at all.
KEEP THE SUPPORT COMING!
Book sales also don’t reflect that backers of my Patreon received free copies of books. Top backers previously received printed copies of Cardiac Arrest. This fall, I distributed digital copies for Full Body Manslaughter and some copies of Cardiac Arrest for those who may not have gotten it. I’ve sent out very few for review since I don’t have a mailing list of book bloggers. Running a mailing list where people can unsubscribe requires Mail Chimp and I’m not paying for it. If any reviewers want a free digital copy, they can simply email me and I’d be happy to share.
Also, don’t forget that leaving ratings and reviews wherever you purchased the books helps bring credibility to the stories (that they’re worth people’s money). It’ll also help make them visible in the “customers who bought this also bought that” algorithms.
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AmberUnmasked.com and Vodka O'Clock Podcast. Author of The Farrah Wethers Mysteries, comic book short stories, prose, and non-fiction. Cosplayer and figure model.