The Polymath Slacker: Styles and Stats (Year One)

In order to demonstrate enough about the process of creating your own media character, what follows is a bit of reporting on the business of Polymath Enterprises, LLC (FL). As you may know, the Polymath Slacker is a character made up of other characters. Those characters not only indicate the tendencies of the main character, but can be used to benchmark fairness and equity in representation of each characters' underlying point of view. 

By taking the characters' productivity, using the statistical data about their activity on the forum site (their metadata), the activity of each can be calculated to produce an approximate time-in-thought quotient, indicating the overall time spent in producing all of the posts on the forum, as well as the percentage of time each character's philosophy is represented.

Site administration, construction and moderation stats excluded, the list of sub-character activity in % of time in production is as follows:

• Social Liberal                    - 33.44%

• Central-Planning Statist      - 6.99%

• Minarchist                         - 6.05%

• Localist/Provincial             - 3.76%

• Egalitarian                         - 3.59%

• Fiscal Conservative           - 2.52%

• Anarcho-Capitalist            - 2.24%

• Objectivist Libertarian       - 2.05%

• Conservative/Evangelical   - 0.72% 

• Social Traditionalist           - 0.19%

As is evident, even with 35.43% of the time spent in admin, construction and moderation, the forum leans significantly to the political left of center. Still, this calculation was made in a group of reports on the results of the first year of operation. While indicating tendencies, this gives no weight to the value of the arguments made, and serves to illustrate the need for further diversification in philosophical representation.

The next set of numbers is less about style and more about the forum's functionality as a business. These stats show the potential of the forum to generate advertising revenue: 

                      Unique Visitors          Visits          Pages          Hits         Bandwidth

2012

Mar                            4                     11             164            339            4.84 MB

Apr                           84                   544           9,780        11,408       144.54 MB

May                         178                  660          23,928       25,660       255.34 MB

Jun                           146                  314           7,472         9,010         78.20 MB

Jul                            190                  385           5,957         7,120         65.45 MB

Aug                          128                  415           6,773         7,648         88.41 MB

Sep                          240                  906          15,779       20,504       203.21 MB

Oct                          752                2,367         35,107       40,372       462.60 MB

Nov                         838                2,745         39,999       45,663       527.84 MB

Dec                       1,641               5,110         68,709       73,766        966.30 MB

Total                     4,201              13,457       213,668     241,490          2.73 GB

Using the highest and average RPM (reflections per mil) from this blog, the forum ad revenue value estimate is $17 - $170 for the year ending Dec 2012. As traffic increases (which it has steadily each month) RPM should increase, as well as potential ad revenue. The more people participate with the forum, the more the value of the forum increases.

A central motivation for the Polymath Slacker project is to help individuals develop their own businesses in the wide-open market for opinions and ideas. Hopefully the data in this post is helpful to that end (as either an ideal example or one to improve upon).

Thanks for reading.