Interesting Stats About My Community Work This Year

My Microsoft MVP status is up for renewal again, so it’s time for a little navel-gazing at the community work I’ve done over the last twelve months. Here’s the data I found most surprising this time around.

YouTube Channel Stats

This one just completely boggles my mind – you have watched OVER 23,000 HOURS of our videos this year, and that’s just since September 1st:

3 people are watching a Brent Ozar Unlimited video, around the clock! We must find these three people and show them a different web site or something. Maybe Taylor Smith’s goat duets. I could watch that around the clock myself.

I’m very proud of the “Total Estimated Earnings: $0” number, too. Sure, we could run ads on our videos, but I like to think that the product is us. If you like us, you’ll hire us for work.

Of course, I can’t claim credit for the whole channel – I’m only doing about 1/4 of the videos, because Jeremiah, Kendra, and Jes all share the weekly webcasts with me. (These metrics don’t even count live webcast attendees.)

DBAReactions Tumblr Stats

This year we launched DBAreactions.tumblr.com as a way to share some of the funny moments of database administration. DBAs have such an oddball job, and nobody gets it but us. Turns out there’s a lot of “us”, too:

I’m so pleasantly surprised that almost 50k people have found it funny enough to spend an average of four minutes each, surfing through the images! That’s awesome. On average, people read through about 5 pages worth of gifs. (I can’t blame them – when I find a Tumblr I like, I go through several pages. Major distraction during crappy days.)

The @DBAreactions Twitter account has over 1,100 followers. This is probably my favorite way to enjoy DBAreactions – I usually write most of them in one sitting, filling up the queue for the next week, and then I chuckle when I see them pop up on my Twitter screen.

I never would have expected DBAreactions to be so popular. No way. I thought it’d just be a fun way for me to blow off steam, and we haven’t put any SEO work into the site or anything like that. It’s just an ugly web page with funny graphics.

Ozar.me Analytics

I don’t know how MVP status works, but I’ll always wonder if I would have qualified as a Microsoft Surface MVP this year. I gotta think I had the most viral Surface RT post out there just based on this graph:

That huge spike is my Why I’m Returning My Microsoft Surface RT post. After hitting several news sites, it garnered over 500 comments, 200k page views, and an average time on page of over 8 minutes.

The Internet is such a funny thing. I penned that post quickly, recorded a couple of videos with no planning or rehearsal, tossed it up online on a Saturday (weekends are the worst time to promote a tech blog post), and left home to go shopping for the day with Erika. It exploded.

My Plan for the Next Twelve Months

I’ll buy gadgets, come up with reasons why they suck, return them, and tell the story with animated GIFs.