Jun 29 2008
Not That I’ve Been Keeping Track or Anything
After two months of just barely missing the mark, the site finally broke past the one million unique visitors mark, and with one day and three hours to spare:
What does it mean? Not much, considering I don’t run advertising on the site, and also because, as a friend recently noted, it’s not that a million different people are visiting the site, it’s mostly the same 30,000 or so on a daily basis, plus a few thousand people who hit the site more or less randomly on any given day, added up over the course of a month. That said, it’s still a nice number of people coming by to read, and it’s still a nice feeling to get into the seven-digit range in aggregate. For the first half of 2008, I’ll end up with just over 5.7 million visits; to give you some perspective on that, in 2006 I got 6.125 million visits for the entire year, and in 2004, I saw about 1.8 million visits. It’s good to grow.
I’ve said it before, but just in case you’ve all missed me saying it, I’ll say it again: Thanks for coming by, and continuing to come by. I’m glad to have you here, whether you’ve been visiting for years or are here for the first time. Welcome.
I'm the Creative Consultant for this television show, appearing Fridays on Syfy. Miss a week? For US residents, 
Thank you, Mr Scalzi, for having such pleasant digs.
I blame Wil Wheaton. He pointed me to this sight and now I visit many times a day.
And here I am, giving the site one last look before I log off in case of a cat, dog, or rant posting to round off my evening. Congratulations! I found your blog at the end of last year and now have a Scalzi section on my bookshelves, so ‘whatever’ you’re doing is working well. I think I need to make myself a kitchen foil hat…
It is my pleasure. Very fun to read.
I wonder if I’m counted; I read every day, but the RSS feed via Google Reader. So it’s not even a unique hit from my reader to your feed, it’s just Google’s…. I don’t know, RSS bot or whatever, so probably everyone who reads via Google counts as one hit to the RSS feed. (Or Atom, I don’t even know which one I’m reading. It’s one of the feeds.)
I probably do hit up the main site at least once a month though for an entry or two, so I’m probably in the 1,000,000. (I’m hitting it now, so I will be before June’s out if I wasn’t before!) Plus I hit the ‘esque every day, so if that counts then I’m definitely in there.
Dude,
I’m scoring an average of 66 visits per day! And I’ve racked up a total of almost 21,000 in my first six months.
Keep your eyes on the rear-view. I may creep into sight sometime in 2018!
Nice. How’s the page views per month?
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but due to my own neuroses, I used 12,857 unique IP addresses to read your website this month.
Josh Jasper:
I’ll hit 2 million page views this month sometime tomorrow.
I came here to read your review of Journey’s new album, and I immediately bookmarked it. Along with Balloon-Juice and Kung Fu Monkey, it’s already one of my favorite blogs. So, don’t thank us for visiting, thank you for giving us good reasons to visit and keep visiting.
John, out of curiosity how much bandwidth per month from scalzi.com do you use? I ask only because as Captain Overkill I have 500 GB alloted bandwidth for several websites (that I mostly tinker with) and barely dent a percent of a percentage of the 500 GB.
Well, hey, thanks. It’s been kind of fun hanging around here. Lately, I wish I had more time for it.
J.K. Richard:
This month I’ve used 435 GB of bandwidth. But I’m allowed three terabytes of bandwidth a month, so I’ve got some headroom yet.
wow i counted lol :D
So, the goal is to make you about 6.5 times as popular as you currently are, then. (But not 7!)
The Google feed reader bot politely informs its targets how many readers it represents, but I’ve no idea if John’s stat scripts use that data.
They do. As I mentioned recently, Google’s bots account for well under 1% of traffic.
I think you misunderstood me. Google’s feed bot will only check your site once for all it’s users, but it alters it’s user agent string to give you a bit of data. Here’s an example:
Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; X subscribers; feed-id=<whatever>)Your log analyser would have to devote special attention to parsing the google feedfetcher’s user agent, and it’d have to pull some mojo to verify that it’s actually from google and not someone pulling shenanigans.
You had me at Creation Museum…
You know, and all the other stuff too :)
Thanks for the awesome and insightful running commentary, it’s always fun.
Yay us!
1 million? That’s like…huh…many, many times more than my visitor count. It can’t be your wit and wisdom. It’s those darn cat pictures, isn’t it?
Note to self: Must get a cat.
Congrats, John. The idea of 1 million visitors is wild!
Thank you for providing a great site with varied and interesting content. If you don’t build it, they don’t come.
Very impressive – especially for a site without any adult content ;-)
Congrats – the reason people keep showing up is due to the content (and the cats of course)
John, no need to thank us. You provide entertaining and/or insightful and/or informative writing every day, all for free. Plus, cat pictures! What’s not to like? Except, of course, for your strange, somewhat disturbing obsession with Journey…
I like the cut of your jib, young fellow me lad. (As Edmund Blackadder might say).
I surfed in on the voting controversy months ago (from Making Light) and expressed a) how great the post was and b) how I’d never read any of your novels. I was physically threatened by the gremlins in my computer-box, so I’m reading your novels soon.
So . . . hey look, is that the pope?
Er . . . read that “I’d never” part in my last post as “I had never” rather than “I would never” . . .
Damned contractions.
You can blame Wil Wheaton for me wandering into the blog as well, though in my defence I’d bought the OMW series and handed ‘em to the wife (who promptly ploughed through ‘em and said “more please” before actually turning up here.
I like your writing style, so getting a free daily dose is just spiffy. Thanks for putting up with my blitherings.
First, thanks for the site, sorry for the question :).
A million visitors/month seems nicely monetizable. I could imagine book publishers liking your audience, and paying you money to put a banner link to their book here. Is that something you’re morally against? I’m not suggesting you sprinkle in text links to trick people into clicking, but an obviously ad-ish banner ad…
Anyway, this is probably just my growing need to get out of the cube and into some sort of self-employment speaking. I love the free content as much as everybody :).
Thanks.
tc7:
I’m not morally against it, I just don’t need the money at the moment. If it came to a point where I wasn’t making money otherwise, I would do it, and I don’t think people would think ill of me for doing so.
I love this blog and would like to add my thank yous to those of everyone above. There’s always plenty to read with you updating so often. And on the rare occasions you haven’t updated since I last looked, there’s years’ worth of content in the archives to ferret through. You’ve given me hours and hours of entertainment. Unfortunately, often when I should have been doing something else, but that’s just life. Cheers John!
What Gillian @ 30 said with the following addition. I jump into the archives via the random posts and always have the same reaction. “Dang it, I wish I had been here when this originally posted” or “you knew about the site from the books a couple of years ago and you waited till now? What a dope!” My conscience can be a little harsh at times but this time it’s right.
Obviously, I’m having a great time and it’s all your doing.
Thanks John