Patrick Comerford
This month is proving to be exceptionally busy time on this blog, with an overwhelming rise in figures for viewing and reading. These figures reached a total of 53 million hits by late this afternoon (9 September 2026), passing the million mark for the fifth time since the end of last month. The figures reached 52 million hits two days ago (7 September), only two days after reaching 51 million late on Saturday (5 September), 50 million the day before (4 September) and 49 million four days previously (31 August).
I continue to find these viewing and readership figures overpowering, and this blog continues to reach volumes of readers I never expected when I first started blogging 16 years ago. At the end of last year, this blog had 21 million hits (31 December 2025). So far this year, there have been more than 32 million hits or visitors in 2026 alone.
This means two-thirds of readers or hits have been this year alone (32 million out of a total of 53 million), and half of all hits or reader figures have been in little more than six months, with 26.5 million since 3 March 2026. I first began blogging in 2010, and it took almost two years until July 2012 to reach half a million readers. Throughout this year and last, the daily figures have often been overwhelming. Of the 10 days of busiest traffic on this blog, six or more than half of them were in this month along (1, 4, 5, 7, 8 and 9 September), two were in May (1 and 14 May) and two were the previous month (29 and 30 April):
• 1,124,925 (1 May 2026)
• 647,187 (5 September 2026)
• 618,234 (8 September 2026)
• 525,719 (14 May 2026)
• 513,725 (7 September 2026)
• 509,644 (29 April 2026)
• 407,835 (4 September 2026)
• 365,432 (9 September 2026, by 6 pm this evening)
• 356,335 (1 September 2026)
• 344,003 (30 April 2026)
The daily average has been about 490,000 a day so far this month. Yet, I recall how 10 years ago, back in 2016, the daily average was around 1,000, or 30,000 a month.
Some curious though random statistics help to put this new figure of 53 million into perspective:
The richest 1% of the population in the United Kingdom holds wealth equivalent to the combined bottom 80%, or 53 million people.
According to Professor Alex de Waal of Tufts University, five men – Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, King Leopold II of Belgium and Pol Pot – each deliberately made famines that killed more than a million people, with a total of 53 million deaths, almost 40 per cent of aggregate global famine mortality since 1870.
The Securitas depot robbery in Tonbridge 20 years ago was the largest cash heist in the UK. It began with a kidnapping on the evening of 21 February 2006 and ended in the early hours of 22 February, when seven criminals stole almost £53 million. The gang left behind another £154 million because they did not have the means to move it.
About 53 million people across Europe live in regions identified as being at risk for floods.
Calculations earlier this year show that the EU population will fall by 11.7 per cent by 2100, losing approximately 53 million people. Japan’s population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century.
About 53 million books are left unfinished in the UK each year because busy readers run out of time. Research shows that roughly 53,094,541 books are abandoned annually before reaching the final chapter.
53 million minutes is equal to 100 years, 9 months and 7 days. This means that if this blog was receiving just one hit a minute, I would need to have started blogging back at the turn of 1925 and 1926.
I retired from active parish ministry about 4½ years ago, on 31 March 2022. These days, though, about 150 people on average are reading my daily prayer diary posted on this blog each morning, or more than 1,000 people each week.
This evening, as this blog moves beyond 53 million hits, I am truly grateful to the real readers among that 53 million. In particular, I am thankful for the faithful core group of people who join me in prayer, scripture reading and reflections each day.
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