Patrick Comerford
This blog reached yet another new peak this afternoon (3 May 2025), totalling up 12 million hits since I first began blogging almost 15 years ago, back in 2010.
Once again, I find this is both a humbling statistic and a sobering figure that leaves me not with a sense of achievement but a feeling of gratitude to all who read and support this blog and my writing.
After I began blogging, it took almost two years until July 2012 to reach half a million readers. It was over a year before this figure rose to 1 million by September 2013. It combed steadily to 2 million, June 2015; 3 million, October 2016; 4 million, 19 November 2019; 5 million, 27 March 2021; 6 million, 1 July 2022; 7 million, 13 August 2023; 8 million, 30 April 2024; and 9 million, 21 October 2024.
But the rise in the number of readers has been phenomenal over the past few months, reaching 9.5 million on 4 January 2025, 10 million over a week later (12 January 2025), 10.5 million two days after that (14 January 2025), 11 million a month later on 12 February 2025, and 11.5 million a month after that on 10 March 2025.
Indeed, January 2025 was the first month this blog ever had 1 million hits in one single month – or even within a fortnight – with 1 million hits by mid-January, in the early hours of 14 January, and a total of 1,420,383 by the end of that month (31 January 2025).
In recent months, the daily figures have been overwhelming on occasions. Eight of the 10 days of busiest traffic on this blog have been in January 2025 alone, and the other two of those ten busiest days were in March and April:
• 289,076 (11 January 2025)
• 285,366 (12 January 2025)
• 261,422 (13 January 2025)
• 100,291 (10 January 2025)
• 64,077 (14 January 2025)
• 55,344 (25 January 2025)
• 52,831 (27 January 2025)
• 42,946 (26 January 2025)
• 36,898 (29 April 2025)
• 36,746 (31 March 2025)
This blog has already had over 2.5 million hits this year, over 20 per cent of all hits ever.
Joseph Heller famously wrote in Catch-22 once said ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’ The quotation has since been attributed to Kurt Cobain. But I have noted that eight of these dates are in the week before and after Trump’s inauguration, and that the overwhelming number of hits are not from Ireland, the UK and Greece, as I might expect, but from the US. The bots at work in Washington must be trawling far and wide for anyone critical of the Trump regime, but I doubt my criticisms of Trump, Vance and Musk are going to make it easy to get a visa to visit the US over the next four years, should I ever want to under the present regime.
With this latest landmark figure of 12 million hits by today, over 1.4 million hits in January alone, and over half a million hits within the past month, I once again find myself asking questions such as:
• What do 12 million people look like?
• Where do we find 12 million people?
• What would £12 million, €12 million or $12 million buy?
• How far away would 12 million miles be?
Yemen is experiencing a major humanitarian crisis in the history; 12 million children are in need for food, water, shelter and medicine, and children are fighting an epidemic, a pandemic, famine and a war at the same time.
More than 12.4 million people have been forced from their homes across Sudan – including over 3.3 million refugees who have fled to neighbouring countries – fleeing civil war, fuel famine, disease outbreaks and the collapse of the health system.
Hitler, by ordering the mass extermination of Jews and other minorities, caused an estimated 12 million people to be murdered over 12 years, including 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Counting the casualties from World War II would raise this number considerably, to more than 50 million, and as many as 12 million Germans.
The Nazis’ ‘1,000-year Reich’ lasted only 12 years from January 1933 to May 1945. That would be about 1 million people killed a year or 2,740 people a day, every day they were in power. And yet it was still going on only seven years before I was born.
The world has a population of 7.75 billion people, and 12 million represent only 0.15%, a modest number I suppose.
Based on World Bank estimate of GDP per capita, of the 10 top nations the US is the only one with a population above 12 million.
Countries with a population of about 12 million people include Bolivia and Tunisia. Cities with populations of about 12 million people include Los Angeles, Moscow, Shenzhen and Lahore.
Greek is spoken by about 12 million people as their first language.
The Uyghurs, with about 12 million people, are a significant ethnic group in China.
More than 12 million people around the world die every year because they live or work in unhealthy environments.
Reports show 12 million people were living in absolute poverty in the UK in 2022-2023, representing an increase of 600,000 and a rate of 18% of the population. This figure was the highest increase in absolute poverty in 30 years, partly due to the energy price crisis. The BBC reported that without government support, even more families would have fallen into poverty.
Recent research shows that 24% of UK adults, or 12.2 million people, have already missed at least one payment in the last year. More than eight million people across the UK need to get debt advice and over 12 million more live on the edge.
The Greek shipping heiress Athina Onassis once bought an Irish horse for €12 million. In 2016, the sole surviving descendant of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis bought MHS Going Global, the Irish gelding ridden at the 2012 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro by the Co Tipperary show jumper Greg Broderick.
Cambridge University is reported to have received between £12 million and £19 million from China between 2020 and 2024. The funding is part of almost £50 million donated to the 24 Russell Group universities by Chinese sources during this period.
Villa Park, the home of Aston Villa, has a capacity of 42,640 people. It would take more than 280 stadiums the size of Villa Park to hold 12 million people.
One of the most warming figures personally in the midst of all these statistics is the one that shows how my morning prayer diary reached by an average of 74 or 75 people each day in the past month. It is almost three 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 averaged 500 to 520 people a week.
Today, I am very grateful to all 12 million readers and viewers of this blog to date, and for the small core group among them who join me in prayer, reading and reflection each morning.
