The first week of December 2005 I bought and installed Mint to track visitors to my site. In the six years since then I’ve had 120,032 page views from 63,608 unique visits. Not huge numbers but satisfying ones to me.
Each year has seen a steady increase in the number of visitors with the past twelve months having just over 36,000 visits.
The twist on this story is what happened yesterday, and is still happening this morning. A four year old posting of mine, on the difference between an acronym and a set of initials was linked to from Reddit’s TIL sub-reddit.
A normal hour on my site sees anywhere from 2 to 10 page views, with a typical day weighing in at around 80-120 visits. A big week might see something in the upper 800s for a total. Yesterday I had 795 page views on 734 visits. Already today I’ve had 167 page views on 155 visits. I have no idea how long the surge will last, but I’m enjoying watching it immensely.
Since the number of page views is basically a 1:1 ratio with the number of visits I know that most people are looking at the posting linked to from Reddit and then moving on to something else. I don’t think I am gaining too many new repeat readers. What I am most curious to see is the long-term effect of yesterday’s link to my site.