At the risk of sounding like a cloud computing commercial (which lord knows I don't want to do), everything we do at the network generates a lot of data. I've spoken before about the ways that we gather listener and download data, but I'd like to follow up on my previous article by talking about Abject Suffering... and the massive number of suggestions we have.
This will be a quick article, but here's how the numbers break down for our Suggestion Database as of 1/1/2016.
There are 789 games in the database right now. That means when we roll up a new episode, your suggestion has a about a 0.1% chance of coming up (but that's still a chance!).
However, that's not the total number of suggestions we've gotten. No, that clocks in at 921 total suggestions.
Why the disparity? Some games are suggested more than once. In fact, here's how that breaks down.
- 95 games have been suggested twice.
- 30 games have been suggested three times.
- 6 games have been suggested four times.
- 1 game has been suggested five times (That game? "The You Testament").
Note: If those numbers don't add up, it's because each category is exclusive... for example, The You Testament isn't included in the previous three totals.
Those games come from 284 suggestors, which means about 1/6 of the people who currently listen to Abject Suffering have suggested a game for it, and the average suggestions-per-suggestor is 3.24.
Who are the top 5 most prolific suggestors? Keen listeners (and crabby iTunes reviewers) won't be surprised.
- Sam Bair - 110
- ARCHIVE LOVER - 49
- Super Boy Alan - 38
- Tim H - 35
- 30
Note: This doesn't include episodes that have already aired... Just ones that are sitting in the hopper.*
Interested to know which systems are most commonly requested? This might also fail to shock you.
- NES - 143
- PC - 138
- SNES - 96
- DOS - 82
- PSX - 74
This is out of 41 systems. What are the least popular systems for suggestions? The Lynx, PSN, Intellivision, and Odyssey 2 are all platforms that only have one game suggested for them.
Note: Suggested games can count for multiple systems. All of the systems that a multiplatform game was released on have been accounted for.
I think that's all of the interesting data from the Abject Suffering suggestion mine. Of course, this is likely to change daily... but don't expect me to update this entry. Consider it a snapshot.
Also, this isn't a paid spot or anything, but Airtable.com is a crazy nice database service, and I'm in the process of porting most of my spreadsheets over from Google Docs to it. If I find any other interesting numbers or patterns, would you be curious to see them?