A reader sent me this email message on New Year’s Eve:

I just wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed reading your sane and authoritative commentaries over the last year.  "Spark of hope" indeed!  More power to you!

What a kind thought. Sane. Authoritative. Hopeful. Powerful. Yup – that’s this website!

Much appreciated.

I have looked at the numbers for readers here in 2011. According to one way of crunching them, I peaked in August with 11,500 unique visitors (ie people, not Google spiders) and hit a low in July (5200 visitors). Over the year as a whole 86,600 unique visitors swung by (some more than once, I suspect), giving 258,000 visits for the year looking at 700,000 pages.

That’s just over 7000 unique visitors per month, which given the esoteric, eccentric, annoying and often rather specialist subject-matter of most posts here is OK by me.

It was again especially gratifying that some 30,000 visits lasted for 30 minutes to an hour, or even longer. Some of you really like rummaging around and spending time here. This in fact is why I decided to write a blog and not a book* about my life and times in diplomacy. With the blog I get more readers, and more interaction – a relationship.

My main problem is that I am spreading my declining intellectual jam a bit thinly these days. As well as keeping up some sort of flow of work here (latterly noticeably reduced, but there you are), I emit Tweets at @charlescrawford, write a monthly column for DIPLOMAT magazine, do book reviews for the LSE website and contribute assorted rants to The Commentator. In the last weeks of 2011 I was signed up as a Daily Telegraph blogger too. Not to forget a number of other articles for business and foreign policy websites.

That’s a lot of material to create almost every day. And while I am mulling over what if anything to say next on one or other of these outlets, I have to try to earn a living by writing speeches or training or consulting or whatever comes along.

This site has not been any special money-spinner – more a money-loser in terms of the opportunity cost of generating all these words for free. The ads I added to the site this year bring in nothing much so far(!), but I have had a couple of approaches via the site for fee-paying work, including an invitation to give a keynote speech at an event in Romania later this year.

Anyway, many thanks to you all for your support and unobtrusive but wise thoughts. I hop into 2012 still nursing my gammy ankle which I twisted observing the Russian elections in early December. I’ll try to be a bit more productive here this year, but don’t count on my succeeding. If you don’t fine me here I’ll be over at one of the other places mentioned above. Or not.

Happy New Year to all

* A reader asks via Twitter – have I written enough words for a book?

Hmm – let’s see.

It turns out that a normal book contains anything up to 120,000 words. If we take this one post as average, it has some 500 words. I have written 2400 posts here. Which makes something like 1,250,000 words roughly ten books. That’s not counting over 30 DIPLOMAT articles at 1500 words each (three more books!). And all the other website pieces.

So that’s something like 15 or more respectably long books. All written just for you. For free!

The wonders of the Internet. Maybe I should make a compendium and try to self-publish via Amazon or something. The perfect gift for next Christmas?