• Year 1: Got Milk? (June 21, 2008)
• Year 2: Lessons I Learned in Business School (Or, My Humble Attempt to Save You $150k) (June 3, 2009)
• Year 3: Economists Don’t Care About Poor People (March 5, 2010)
• Year 4: On Stories vs. Data (March 29, 2011)
• Year 5: Art and Democracy: The NEA, Kickstarter, and Creativity in America (April 9, 2012)
• Year 6: Looking Beyond Our Borders for National Arts Education Policies (January 15, 2013)

Enjoy!

Since my last “blogiversary” post two years ago, Createquity has come a long way. Most significant has been the introduction of the Createquity Writing Fellowship program, which has been fantastically successful at diversifying the voice of the site, generating more content for the Arts Policy Library, helping some newer arts professionals get exposure and hone their writing chops, and generally turning Createquity into more of the virtual think tank it was always supposed to be. This year, we’ve also seen a jump in audience as posts (notably “Creative Placemaking Has An Outcomes Problem“) have started to get picked up in more “mainstream” non-arts outlets such as Salon, Slate, and Fast Company, and Nina Simon sending hordes of her admiring fans our way this summer didn’t hurt either. Finally, I was tickled to see that Createquity got its first ever Wikipedia cite this year (and no, neither I nor Aaron had anything to do with it).

Here are a few Createquity facts and figures, for the stat geeks among you:

Number of subscribers: 2,794 (as of today)
Number of posts: 530, including this one
Number of words: 520,320
Number of Createquity Writing Fellows: 8 (and counting)
Most popular post: Creative Placemaking Has an Outcomes Problem, by a long shot, at nearly 10,000 page views (which doesn’t include times it was viewed in a feed reader, email, or on the homepage). The next one on the list is Katherine Gressel’s Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation, which very briefly held the top spot before being overtaken by Creative Placemaking shortly afterwards. I’m very proud of the fact that the 2nd-most-read post all time on Createquity was written by one of our Fellows.
Proof that all y’all have longer attention spans than people give you credit for: When writing for other blogs, I often face pressure to limit my word count for fear of losing readers. But the best-read Createquity posts are also some of its longest. In fact, of the top 10 all-time, all are over 1,000 words, six are over 2,500, and two have more than 5,000 words!
Wordiest author: Excluding one-off guest posts like that of Eric Booth and Tricia Tunstall, that would be Katherine, averaging 2,796 words per post. It may surprise you to learn that I have the shortest average post length of any Createquity writer.
Most common search terms: Createquity, arts sustainability, create equity, how to solve calendar problems (because of this post)
Most bizarre search term: “some benefits to user and some developer that a rise from realising software as a moss?”

If you’d like to leave Createquity a little present for its fifth birthday, I would be much obliged if you would participate in a little “roll call” in the comments. Tell us a little about yourself and your experience with the site – when and how you first discovered Createquity, what makes you keep coming back, your favorite post or series, and most importantly, any suggestions/thoughts/ideas you may have for the future! Createquity is what it is because of you, after all, and I thank you for your continued engagement and interest after all this time.

This past year hasn’t seen a ton of changes for the blog itself, but during that time my own life has changed dramatically, with a new job, a return to New York, and more direct involvement in the issues I’m writing about at the top of the list. More on that evolution in a future post (after vacation’s over). In the meantime, thank you for your support and remember to vote on November 2!