Happy Birthday, Crash Course!

One year ago today, the final installment of the Crash Course was loaded to the site.

Happy birthday, Crash Course!

It was a terrible concept and a worse business decision.  Three and a half hours of intellectually dense material, lacking a happy ending, that I decided to give away for free.  On paper, it should have been a disaster.  But in reality, it has been enormously successful, having been featured in the Washington Post, on PBS, in the Huffington Post, and on Financial Sense Newshour with Jim Puplava, just to name a few..

So now that a year has passed, and this incredible and vibrant community has coalesced around the Crash Course, let's review where we've been and what we've accomplished.

By the Numbers

ChrisMartenson.com has some thoroughly amazing traffic statistics.  This snapshot from Google Analytics shows the data for the past year (from 10/21/2008 to 10/21/2009):

More than 1.1 million visitors, 3 million visits, and over 10 million page views.  I admit that we could have gotten a lot more traffic if we had focused a bit more on celebrity gossip, but considering the subject matter, I think these are remarkable numbers.

The number I am most proud of is underlined with a red dotted line - 8:37 minutes.  This is the average amount of time people have spent at each visit to ChrisMartenson.com over the past year, and it is a remarkable web statistic.  This averages in all the people who bounced off after 10 seconds with the folks who settled in and watched the entire Crash Course in one sitting and then wandered over to the forums to pen an essay or two.

This one number indicates that excellent content can attract people and hold their attention.

Where did all these people come from?

According to Alexa, they - you - came from all over the globe. A quick word on Alexa rankings:  A lower number is better, and the actual number represents where the website stands in comparison to every single other website in the world. So if there are 15,000,000 websites and you have a ranking of 150,000, you are in the top 1%.  The Alexa ranking of this website is certainly respectable on a world-wide basis, with a score of ~45,000.  It appears that I might find more than a few friends to share a meal with in New Zealand or Sri Lanka or Poland, according to the table below:

Just looking at the Crash Course itself, the main landing page has been viewed more than one and a quarter million times:

 Some 26,000 DVDs have been sold, more than 100,000 downloads have been recorded from the Torrent sites, and the ~50,000 views from YouTube accompany the unknown statistics of numerous other sites that host the Crash Course on their own servers.

Because we don't know how many times the DVDs or downloads have been viewed, we have to guess, but I feel comfortable estimating that the Crash Course has been viewed by roughly 1.5 million individuals.

Translation Efforts

The Crash Course is now also fully available in Spanish (here at ChrisMartenson.com and on YouTube), and is completely translated into French (in text form only), with Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish, and Chinese on the way.

A year ago, the Crash Course was only available in English.

All of these translation efforts have been made by volunteers, and we are deeply grateful for their dedication and hard work.

The Most Important Results

The most important results are the numerous testimonials and heartfelt emails that we receive on an ongoing basis, explaining (for example) how the Crash Course helped to change the writer's thinking, sort out critical life decisions, or nudge a reluctant partner.

Beyond our wildest hopes, the Crash Course has proven to be a remarkably effective agent of change.  I guess this shouldn't have been too surprising, since it's the same information that caused me and my family to utterly transform our own path through life.

Resisting Temptation

I promised myself that once the Crash Course was completed, I would let a whole year pass, spending that time in the service of spreading awareness and building understanding about the issues contained within the Crash Course. Intent on this path, I resisted numerous calls to move into solutions or to promote specific organizations or causes.

I did this because I knew deep down that it would have been premature to move into solutions before achieving a critical mass of awareness and understanding.  I also refrained because I knew that stepping through one door often means closing two or more others.

It is my fervent belief that we need everybody on board for this next transition.  Therefore, keeping all the doors open seemed the most prudent course of action.

What's next?

I am glad that I had the wisdom to stay out of the "solutions space" until now.  This year has been a very rich learning experience for me.  Looking back, I am certain I would have made choices with less insight and understanding than I now have.   It was worth the wait.

This next year will be all about addressing "What's next?" and choosing from among the many possible courses of action, organizations, and solutions to actively promote critical change.

The Vision

I truly believe that we have the time and the resources to pull off a relatively gentle and favorable outcome.  But there's also a set of very dark potential futures laid out before us that will result from blindly adhering to the status quo.

The difference between these separate futures is really up to us.  Each of us individually, and all of us collectively. 

As I've pondered this over the past year, it occurs to me that if we want to have any hope of wrestling humanity back to living within the carrying capacity of the earth without traveling a very dark road, we are going to need a social movement.

And not just any movement, but a mammoth grassroots effort that has the full weight of our wisdom and spirit behind it .

We will need to redefine our sense of prosperity into what I call "True Prosperity" - a place where we are living with less stuff, but more happiness and satisfaction.  We'll need to change our priorities, our economic model (sorry, debt-based money; you lose), what we value, and even the stories we tell ourselves.

But to do any of this, we need a vision, along with the words and messages necessary to convey it, or nobody will agree to follow along.  I intend to bring what leadership I can to this effort and to reach out and offer my skills to whomever is already heading in the right direction.

At the very core, I hold a belief that the future can only be great if we are ready to pursue truly non-status-quo-solutions and if we are willing to release those that don’t work or no longer serve us.

I see a future of opportunity and relative abundance if, and only if, we elevate the position of 'careful steward' above all others.

Achieving Balance

I have a confession to make.  All of the success and numbers above have come at a great cost.   A personal cost, measured in fourteen-hour work-days, carrying the weight of a small business and letting too many other facets of my life take a back seat.  I am in the worst physical shape of my life, and fixing that has to go right near the top of my personal priority list.  With this first-year anniversary, I strive to fine-tune my current list of responsibilities and spread out into new areas.

I have a responsibility to myself and my family, which will translate into efforts to enhance our homestead.

I have an ongoing commitment to my enrolled members, and this is of utmost importance to me.  Words cannot express how much I appreciate your dedication.

I intend to continue shaping and guiding the public portion of ChrisMartenson.com.

And I feel compelled to work as hard as I can to turn the vision I described above into reality.

Each of these areas could easily represent a full time job for the next year.  And though I simply can't manage four full-time jobs in 2010, I can do my very best to manage my time, resources, and team so that all four areas get the attention they require over the next year and beyond.

Thank You

I want to thank the many supporters of this site.  So many of you have offered support in different and valuable ways.  I am very grateful to the people who contribute by posting here at ChrisMartenson.com, and those who have promoted the Crash Course via e-mail and in their communities.   I greatly appreciate the contributions of those who have volunteered their time as Brigade members, translators, and moderators, along with those who have contributed to our outreach efforts in other helpful ways.

And an especially heartfelt thank you goes to those who have supported this site financially with donations, with enrolled memberships, and sometimes both.  Without your financial support, this site would still be pretty much just an idea in some guy's head (mine).

To the casual reader it may not be apparent, but an enormous amount of effort and dedication are required to keep the content fresh, the conversations civil, the topics germane, and the trolls at bay.  To our moderators must go an enormous rousing cheer of gratitude, another to Davos for many months of assembling the Daily Digest, and another to our new daily contributors as well.

I greatly enjoy working with my staff and all of the tireless volunteers at the site.  Together, we've managed to reach more than a million people in ways that have transformed lives.

So thank you.  And here's to another monumental year ahead.  I cannot wait to see what we can accomplish together.