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[littlefox]

I have not started a new topic thread since my introductory thread. I'm only starting this because it has been bugging me for a while. Man I am really coming out of my shell here.

So it says in the Salon article that Achewood gets 10 million page views a month. First of all, I'm too stupid to know whether or not that's a lot. Could anybody help me understand what those stats mean?

But anyway, that's not really my point. I'm wondering if I just have terrible luck. I can count all the Achewood fans I know in real life on one hand, and two of them are people who I introduced to the strip. I own two Achewood shirts and I wear them plenty 'round the great city of Boston, and never once has a person stopped me to say, "Hey, Achewood! I love that strip." And one of the shirts that I own is the one that merely says "Achewood." So ... you really couldn't expect a person to miss that. (The other one is the “ass in your #####” shirt, which I’ll admit is more obscure.)
My boyfriend got stopped once wearing his "Dude and Catastrophe" shirt, but that's just one time and therefore seems more like dumb luck than burgeoning popularity.

Am I living in an alternate universe where Achewood is an unpopular comic? It's apparently popular enough for Scott Kurtz to begrudge its success (and they tell me you haven’t made it on the internets until Scott Kurtz begrudges your success). Maybe I need to wear my “Achewood” shirt for a week straight, just to up the probability that I will find fellow fans.

To be perfectly frank, the only reason why I bought the shirt with the word “Achewood” on it was so that I could find other people who liked Achewood. And … well, I guess I’m just disappointed that it didn’t work.

[theinevitable]

yeah. Personally I've only met 2 people in real life who read it-- only one of them found it on his own. He told me the other day he hasn't' read it in months, though. The other one is my friend who I introduced it to. I've met several who have read it and didn't' get it. One of them commented "oh, you're one of those" and commented that Achewood is such a popular comic. I have seen no evidence of this, aside from when people crashed the server during the GOF.

[robot_god]

Ten million hits a month simply cannot be true.  I say this because this message board has probably less than 100 active members.  That does not seem like a statistic worthy of about 100,000 unique monthly hits, considering all of these viewers would have to be chronic readers at 100 hits/month.

But I dunno.

If I ever saw an Achewood shirt, I would definitely say something to the wearer.  I live in NY and I have never seen someone wear an Achewood shirt.

[linnea]

Ten million hits a month simply cannot be true.  I say this because this message board has probably less than 100 active members.  That does not seem like a statistic worthy of about 100,000 unique monthly hits, considering all of these viewers would have to be chronic readers at 100 hits/month.

But I dunno.

If I ever saw an Achewood shirt, I would definitely say something to the wearer.  I live in NY and I have never seen someone wear an Achewood shirt.

*****_god, we're a tiny fraction of the Achewood fans out there. Onstad won't link to us due to punishment.

At any rate, I believe the thing about the hits. It's a hugely popular webcomic.  Achewood has gotten a fair bit of press and I think that the readership has gone up. Since it's not syndicated in daily newspapers it might never become a household name...but since it's for an adult audience anyway, maybe it's best that way.

[theinevitable]

oh man, I just realized
like 1000 of those hits are from me, and probably 10,000 are from Q.

DO NOT DENY WHAT YOU KNOW TO BE TRUE.

[pmcd9]

One time Onstad said that he was going to post a strip at a certain time and then failed to deliver on that promise.  Suddenly, within minutes there were like 500 guest on this board.  I'm guessing that 500 is only a small percentage of the people who actually checked in at that particular time to see if the comic had been updated due to the reason Linnea stated.  If the board were linked to the comic we would get a truer measure of the popularity of the strip.  The fact that there are 500 or so members and 100 hardcore posters on a messageboard that has no link to the strip is a strong indication that a lot of people are interested in this comic.

Also, Onstad has expanded his enterprise to three people, himself, his wife, and now the warehouse guy.  You gotta move a lot of merchandise to support three people.  He's got hell of readership.

Also, 10 million isn't that great of a number actually.  That includes every look at everypage by everyone that visits the site.  This board probably gets more traffic than that each month, but it's a messageboard, not an apples to apples comparison.

I met a random person on the street once wearing an It's Impossible to Have a Good Day t-shirt.

[jough]

Achewood.com is way more popular than this message board, and this board gets about 1.5 million hits per month on average (I think it was up to 2.5 during the GOF).

Also, the "hit" isn't really that valuable a unit of measurement these days, at least not for advertisers.  They want to know how many eyeballs are seeing the page, also known as "uniques" which is all short for "how many individuals are actually looking at this thing?"

We got just over 27,000 unique visitors in March, but that "uniqueness" is only by IP address.  So those who check the board several times a day from a dial-up connection probably account for several unique visitors.  Google is a couple hundred of those, and other bots as well.

Bottom line, I have no trouble believing that Achewood gets at least 10^6 hits a month.

[RMJ12345]

I buy it. Think about it - how many people have you met with as weird of a sense of humor as yourself? Achewood, like some foods, hits a very delicate humor palate, and it hits some people - us - just right, and completely misses the rest of the population. And it's only going to hit one person in a while. It's a more specific, literate, and delicate sense of humor than most webcomics - it's not a broad strip.

Not sure if that made any sense. But anyway, I've only ever met one person who had ever heard of Achewood, had been shown it by her boyfriend, and she sure as hell didn't get it. I've shown it to a lot of my friends, and none of them got it.

So it's like a large, but very sparse, population, and a very loyal one.

[V-Adore]

I can buy Achewood getting that many hits. To be honest, I almost never see people in T-shirts even for other, more objectively popular webcomics: there were a couple of dudes I knew in college who wore them, but that was out of a group pretty much self-selected for nerdiness (and thus propensity towards those things). Even Diesel Sweeties and Wigu/Overcompensating/whatever J-Ro is doing this week -- comics that are much more about shirts than Achewood is -- aren't ubiquitous.

What I've really noticed is that references to Achewood on the Internet seem to be becoming more ubiquitous, which I think is a far more robust sign of the strip's popularity and memetic spread. I've seen references in any number of places I wouldn't have expected, with the only explanation being that people are reading the comic. Eerie, huh?

[CortJstr]

I would guess that for an "upscale" webcomic 10 million hits a month is pretty huge. Granted, wwe.com get 67.6 million hits in a single day last week but that's a whole different scripted ballgame.

Even being generous and assuming that the 10 million is made up of different people each checking the strip once per weekday that's still only like 500,000 people spread around the world. The odds of running into one of them on the street are relatively small.

I've seen one guy in a Middle Cat shirt a few months ago and one guy commented on my Special Boy hoodie 3 years ago.

[Turbo Ninja]

Once I was walking out of a subway stop in NYC and I saw a girl walking in wearing a "What We Need More Of Is Science" shirt.  I was wearing my Achewater shirt.  I nearly yelled at the girl but it's New York and the subway and we're strangers and we could've shared a Moment but I also could have been maced or something.

Also my girlfriend was with me and I thought it would be rude to begin a conversation with a strange new woman right in front of her.  Plus some mace might have gotten on her.

(And on the mayor.)

[wombat]

According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the resident population of the United States, projected to 04/10/07 at 13:24 GMT (EST+5) is
301,577,400

So, even assuming all Cort's estimated 500,000 people are all in the US, that means that Achewood readers are 1 out of every, um, OK, I can't do the math. Can someone else?  Is it one out of sixty?

Randomly on the street I have seen a Wigu shirt once or maybe twice and a few of those Goats "Republicans for Voldemort" bumper stickers. But never any Achewood.

[side_show]

I have never met another Achewood fan.  I was walking home one day and saw a skater kid sitting at a bus stop wearing a "what we need more of is science" shirt, but he and his buddies looked like they were the sullen and sarcastic sort, so I just kept walking.

[Ryabovsky]

I've seen one guy in a Middle Cat shirt a few months ago and one guy commented on my Special Boy hoodie 3 years ago.

Were you at U.Va. at the time? 'Cause I saw a guy wearing a Special Boy hoodie about three years ago. I might have even made a comment.

It might shed light on the Charlottesville connection, 'cause I've got a few friends down here who really like it.

[Drastic Action]

The great thing about the 'what we need more of..' shirt is that people who don't even know of achewood seem to appreciate it.  People have said to me, "that's true!!" and such, and if they ask where the shirt is from, they never believe me when I tell them it is actually a cat, not a dog.