There was a time when I was pretty obssessed with the traffic stats for my site. I’ve reached the point, however, where I don’t even think about it anymore and it’s largely the fault of Mark Morgan and Seth Dillingham and their respective companies.
Back in 1999, for example, I was very impressed that my web site served up more than 2,000,000 page views. Heck, I was impressed at the end of 2003, that I racked up an average of almost 16,000 page views/day. My goal was to reach the 34,000 page views/day mark, so I could hit the 1 million/month level.
And then came Seth and Mark and ruined it all for me. First, Seth’s company, Macrobyte, created Conversant, which lets me do a lot of sophisticated categorizing and other content management niceties without having to hire a programmer or become one myself. Then Mark and Yanisar redesigned my most popular site, AnimalRights.Net with an awesome new design.
The result? This server is currently serving up about 70,000 page views per day and growing. That’s just insane.
Why blog? I used to write for a local newspaper with a pretty sizable circulation and on occasion for a large metropolitan newspaper. I’m easily being read by more people now than I could have ever hoped for as a lower level stringer/occasional op-ed writer, and the pay’s about the same (i.e., barely covering my expenses).