John August

Archives for 2012

Zen and the Angst of Kaufman

Episode - 18

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Scriptnotes, Transcribed

Craig and John look at the year ahead, from resolutions (we don’t have any) to reunions (20th!). Along the way, we discuss archery, piano and left-hand weakness.

The bulk of the episode is a discussion of Charlie Kaufman’s BAFTA speech about screenwriting and screenwriters, artistry and artifice. Which of us comes down on the side of self-examination and the purity of intentions? The answer may surprise you!

LINKS:

You can download the episode here: AAC.

UPDATE 1-9-12: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

More posts, more visitors

Follow Up, Meta

Looking at the uptick in visitors for 2011, I speculated that it might be because of Twitter.

I had Ryan pull some numbers, and my new theory is much simpler: more posts means more visitors. The number of visitors was down slightly for 2010 because there were fewer posts.

blog comments chart

Year 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Posts 177 157 165 132 241 172 227 147 190
Comments 16 643 3364 3358 5578 4257 6479 4019 4890

2011, by the numbers

Meta

As the new year begins, this feels like a good time to look at some quantitative measures for how it went with this site and various projects.

I’ve had Google Analytics running on johnaugust.com since 2007. Here’s a look at how readership has grown over the past four years:

blog readership chart

Other than links to stuff I’ve made, I don’t run any ads on the site, so readership metrics aren’t especially important. But it’s interesting to see the numbers edging up after dropping a little in 2010.

My best guess for why: Twitter. This year, I’ve been fairly consistent about tweeting each new post. That brings in both regular readers and new readers who come to the site through re-tweets.

A lot of the basic question-answering, which used to be this site’s main focus, has transitioned over to screenwriting.io, which now has 96 posts on various topics. Daily visits are low, but most of the traffic is coming as the result of very specific Google searches — “How long should a screenplay be?” — which was its goal at inception.

Apps and audio

The Scriptnotes podcast that Craig Mazin and I started in August has grown a lot, but it’s less obvious which numbers to count.

We have more than 2,000 subscribers through iTunes (which we can measure via FeedBurner), but that figure doesn’t count folks listening to it through their browser — on this site or others. Tracking audio file downloads off the S3 server brings us to 28,000 listeners per installment.

Again, without advertising, it’s not essential to know hard numbers. It’s been gratifying to hear from listeners who’ve been enjoying the podcast.

This year marked the launch of our first iOS app, FDX Reader. This chart of unit sales shows the falloff from our initial launch, the spike when we introduced the iPhone version, and the results of a one-week sale:

fdx reader chart

As I blogged before, we’re not going to be adding anything new to FDX Reader. Our next app is for the Mac, and we have other iOS apps in the pipeline. More news on that this week.