Script Frenzy: MATHS!!!

You know I love the statistics. Anyhow, with the latest missive from the High Holy Temple of Frenzy, we get some numbers to play around with. According to the aforementioned post there were 7876 participants. And of those 1072 “won” by entering a 20+k into the word counter (Like my own slightly fraudulent but impressive looking 24k. Oh, I wrote that much. I just didn't write a finished script.). That's, as the post mentions, about a 14% success rate. Or 13.6 something percent rounded up. And, indeed, that's underpar from historical NaNo levels which tend to hover around 18% no matter how many people sign up. That 20k word count is seductively deceptive, I'm telling you. We won't know until some more in-depth numbers are released whether people who enter any amount into their word counter, donate, or even just post on the forums are more likely to succeed. But I suspect the historical trend that such factors have some correlation to success rates will hold true there as well adjusted for the new environment.

But, also from the official site we have the overall word count. Which stands locked at a staggering 29,496,834 words. The Young Writer's Program says they've got another 219k. So call it 30mil. And with the few precious data points we have we can extract some other information. Such, each of the nearly 8k people involved in the contest wrote nearly 3.75k of the nearly 30 million word total. The average participant, then, got only just under a fifth of the way there. About 18~19%, really.

The donation picture, by the way, is much improved although still not exactly rosey from a few weeks earlier when it stood at about $20,000 out of a $120,000 budget. It's up to over $30k now. So, still, each dollar of the budget has underwritten something like 1k of the word count. And each of the nearly 8k people involved has donated, on average, about $4.

The GoodSearch total, by the way, stands at a staggering $40.59. That's pretty good at a penny a search. June ended with $34.84 in the bank but, keep in mind, we started on the 20th with a mere $0.60 and made roughly 350 searches a day since then (I search a lot but not that much. So somebody else out there is putting some change into the jar, so to speak.). We've earned $5.75 already in one and a half days already this month, so at about that same rate. Carry that out over a full month and you'd have around $100. Over a full year, that's $1200. At a penny a search. So, not exactly going to solve the problem, but not exactly chump change, either.