“Anyway, we got a great show for you!  Well, actually, the last half hour is a real garbage dump.  Ugh.  We’ll be right back.” – Krusty the Klown

Ever since the entire text was finally published back in June, the web pages for the mini-book have been among the most popular here at Dead Homer Society.  The daily numbers bounce up and down like a carnival ride, but the biggest ups come when someone links to it on Reddit, 4chan, a message board, or something similar (note to everyone: please keep doing that).  What’s remarkable is how consistent they are relative to one another.  The chart below is September pageviews for each chapter:

Now, WordPress doesn’t have really slick stats that show individual click-throughs, navigation chains and the like, but the numbers displayed above aren’t all that complicated.  Only about 40% of people who click on the first chapter go on to read the second one.  However, people who make it to Chapter 2 tend to read all the way through to the end. 

The dropoff comes at Chapter 13, the first appendix, which sees less than half of the traffic of the main chapters.  Less than half of the people who get through all the main chapters bother to read the appendices.  But even then, people who read the first appendix are highly likely to keep going all the way to the end. 

There’s nothing terribly important about all this, I just thought it was interesting how stable the numbers are.  There are basically three groups of people: 1) those who click on the first chapter, get bored and bail, 2) those who click on the first chapter, get hooked, and read through the nominal end, and 3) those who click on the first chapter, get hooked, and read all the way to the last pixel. 

Thanks go to anyone who has linked the main book page somewhere out there on the ever expanding plains of the internet.  Word of mouth (or keyboard, or whatever) is this book’s only real friend, and I’m grateful for every single href.  Please keep it up. 

[Speaking of gratuitous link whoring, the new site is finally starting to get its legs under it with non-me authors.  These aren’t strictly Simpsons related, but if you’re curious about how American culture is viewed in Britain, the relative merits and awfulness of network television’s realization that non-white people live in America, or just how godawful NPR and company can really be, there’s plenty to check out.  End self promotion.]