Patrick Comerford
Once again, this blog continues to reach more and more readers, reaching yet another overwhelming landmark, with 20 million hits at about 7 am this morning (18 December 2025), and more than 800,000 readers this week alone. There have been almost 1.5 million visitors to this blog so far this month, an average of about 80,000 hits each day so far in December.
Earlier this week, this blog had reached 19.5 million readers by early Sunday afternoon (14 December 2025), having passed the 19 million mark last week (9 December).
I began blogging in 2010, and it took almost two years until July 2012 to reach half a million readers. It more than another year before this figure rose to 1 million by September 2013. This blog reached the 10 million mark earlier this year (12 January), almost 15 years later.
So far this year, the daily figures have been overwhelming on many occasions. Eight of the 12 days of busiest traffic on this blog were this month alone and four were in January:
• 289,076 (11 January 2025)
• 285,366 (12 January 2025)
• 261,422 (13 January 2025)
• 166,155 (15 December 2025)
• 146,944 (14 December 2025)
• 140,417 (16 December 2025)
• 122,398 (17 December 2025)
• 112,221 (13 December 2025)
• 100,291 (10 January 2025)
• 94,824 (12 December 2025)
• 93,575 (11 December 2025)
• 88,333 (10 December 2025)
The latest figure of 20 million is all the more staggering as half of those hits (10 million) have been within this year, since 12 January 2025. The rise in the number of readers has been phenomenal throughout this year, and the daily figures have been overwhelming at times. With this latest landmark figure of 20 million readers, I once again find myself asking questions such as:
• What do 20 million people look like?
• Where do we find 20 million people?
• What does £20 million, €20 million or $20 million mean?
• What would it buy, how far would it stretch, how much of a difference would that much make to people’s lives?
The world’s population hovered is now well over surged past 8 billion, and projections say there could be 10.3 billion of us by the 2080s. Alex Egoshin of vividmaps is a GIS specialist and ecologist working as a researcher in a national park. He has created a series of maps based on Wikipedia’s List of Population Milestones by Country database and he concludes that ‘crossing the 20 million mark was like lighting a great bonfire – a signal that a civilisation had grown too large to ignore.’
He suggests only a few ancient societies reached that mark at an early stage: China may have passed 20 million by 1000 BCE, Persia by 480 BCE, classical Greece by 400 BCE, and Rome by 60 BCE. France joined around 1100 CE, ancient Mexico ca 1250, and the Mali Empire by 1400.
In the modern era, Russia crossed the 20 million line in 1765, Germany by 1770, and Japan by 1815 or earlier. Britain reached 20 million during the early Victorian surge in 1837, the US soon followed in 1844, Poland in 1882, Ukraine in 1883, and Spain in 1911. A wave of nations followed after World War II – including Egypt, Thailand, South Korea and the Philippines by the 1950s, followed by countries like Romania in 1968 and Malaysia in 1995.
Today, cities such as Cairo, Mumbai, Beijing and Dhaka all have close to 20 million inhabitants.
Earlier this year, Donald Trump claimed that Paramount, the new owners of the US TV network CBS, are to provide him with $20 million worth of advertising and programming – just months before filing legal action seeking to squeeze $10 billion out of the BBC.
Winston Churchill’s published work is estimated to come to a total of 20 million words.
20 Million Miles to Earth (also known as The Beast from Space) was a 1957 science-fiction monster film directed by Nathan Juran, with stop-motion animation by Ray Harryhausen and starring William Hopper, Joan Taylor, and Frank Puglia. Set in Italy, the film involves an alien lifeform from Venus that arrives on a crashed rocket, and begins rapidly growing.
The US has a coastline of approximately 20 million metres (20,000 km or 12,400 miles), which is also close to half the circumference of the Earth.
Last month (November) was the olive picking season in Crete, where over 20 million olive trees are cultivated the length and breadth of the island. Olives and olive oil account for one of the main sources of income throughout Crete, so that olive oil is often called ‘Crete’s liquid gold’.
And 20 million minutes is approximately 38 years 4 months. If this blog was getting one hit a minute, it would have taken over 38 years to reach this 20 million mark.
So, yet again, this blog has reached another humbling statistic and a sobering figure, and once more I am left with a feeling of gratitude to all who read and support this blog and my writing.
A continuing and warming figure in the midst of all these statistics continues to be the one that shows my morning prayer diary continues to reach up to 90-100 people each day, with similar figures for my daily Advent Calendar postings at noon. It is almost four years now since I retired from active parish ministry, but I think many of my priest-colleagues would be prayerfully thankful if the congregations in their churches totalled 600 to 700 people twice a week.
Today, I am very grateful to all the 20 million readers of this blog to date, and in particular I am grateful for the small and faithful core group among you who join me in prayer, reading and reflection each morning.
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