How Large Is My Grasp?

The fine people at Word press who support this page gather plenty of metrics for it and present it on a really neat ‘dash board’. I enjoy the map that shows the country a viewer is visiting from. It represents them with the flag of their nation.

That gives me a global warm and fuzzy when ever I look at it. (Also learning the flags of the world.)

The other day I was perusing these stats and thought of one to include.

What percentage of the world population has found my little digital space in the six months it has gone live?

I took the visits and divided them by the world population and arrived at this –

.0000000071%

Talk about feeling small.

Then I thought to put that tiny number in a context, to give it some perspective.

One of the largest audiences in the United States, that I could find for any type of broadcast, is conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh. He has about 30 million listeners per week . Other then taking his word for it, there does not seem to be any other way to verify that number. But lets go with it. Crunching that number I arrived at this –

.0057%

Hmm… that is impressive to say the least. If you look at that figure on an annual basis you arrive at 3%. Even more impressive.

That got me thinking again, Who is bigger? Who reaches the most people on the planet using any form of electronic communications?

The China Ministry of Public Security.

It sensors all the 730 million internet users in China every moment of the day and night. That effectively makes it the largest communications platform on the planet. I could not find one larger.

I read that it employees up to 50 thousand police to accomplish this mind boggling task.

Crunching their audience number comes up with this –

10%

Talk about feeling big.

One final number in this journey of scale.

If it would take 50 thousand people to censor 730 million then it would probably take 150 thousand people to censor 7 billion.

Oddly enough, this number of employees is not even close to the number of Chinese postal workers – 850 thousand plus.

That number is no where near the number of people employed by the world’s largest private employer – 2.1 million for Walmart.

Organizing the man power for world censorship of the web looks very do-able.

Talk about feeling threatened.