The other 72.3% of people who had to find Less Wrong the hard way. 121 people (11.1%) were referred by a friend, 259 people (23.8%) were referred by blogs, 196 people (18%) were referred by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, 96 people (8.8%) were referred by a search engine, and only one person (.1%) was referred by a class in school.

Of the 259 people referred by blogs, 134 told me which blog referred them. There was a very long tail here, with most blogs only referring one or two people, but the overwhelming winner was Common Sense Atheism, which is responsible for 18 current Less Wrong readers. Other important blogs and sites include Hacker News (11 people), Marginal Revolution (6 people), TV Tropes (5 people), and a three way tie for fifth between Reddit, SebastianMarshall.com, and You Are Not So Smart (3 people).

I've long been interested in whether Eliezer's fanfiction is an effective strategy, since it's so attention-getting (when Eliezer popped up in The New Yorker recently, pretty much his whole blurb was a description of MoR).

Of the listed strategies, only 'blogs' was greater than MoR. The long tail is particularly worrisome to me: LW/OB have frequently been linked in or submitted to Reddit and Hacker News, but those two account for only 14 people? Admittedly, weak SEO in the sense of submitting links to social news sites is a lot less time intensive than writing 1200 page Harry Potter fanfics and Louie has been complaining about us not doing even that, but still, the numbers look to be in MoR's favor.