I’m more of a humanities person, and I’ve never been very good with numbers or calculations. So I may well be wrong. Correct me if I am. But still! Isn’t it strange that the most popular LiveJournal users have no more than 17,000 subscribers? The Cyrillic segment of LiveJournal numbers about 850,000 users (according to SUP, the company that ran LiveJournal in Russia). It would be logical to assume that there should be users or communities friended by 5–10% of the audience. That is, there ought to be people with more than 40,000 friends. Of course, this is just a hypothesis, but it is partly supported by the experience of traditional media. Are there online and print publications with a reach of 5–10%? Yes, absolutely. There are plenty of them. And yet the most popular ones — doctor_livsy, nl, drugoi — have only 15,000–17,000 subscribers. In other words, 2% of the audience. As I understand it, SUP’s data is fairly transparent and verifiable. So there seems to be no reason to doubt that the number of Cyrillic LiveJournal users is at least 850,000. So how does that happen? There are 850,000 of us. The level of mutual communication is very high. By my reckoning, the name recognition of the most popular users is no less than 40%. And even people with 5,000 followers are still very rare. If you’ve got 1,000, you’re already pretty cool. I have this nagging feeling that something doesn’t add up..... I’ll have to ask dolboeb when I see him. I’m sure there’s some simple explanation.
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