So, ummm… it looks like this weekend Modern Evil’s viewership so far for 2003 surpassed the total number of viewers for 2002. Which is good. It follows an upward trend we’ve been experiencing lately in traffic. For instance, in 2002 Modern Evil experienced more traffic than in 1999, 2000, and 2001 combined. Traffic to Modern Evil seems to have reached a new plateau right now, and while I expect it to begin going up again in the future…
If the traffic to Modern Evil stayed the same for the remainder of 2003 as it has been steadily in the first 16 weeks of 2003, Modern Evil will have experienced more than twice as much traffic as it had experienced in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002, COMBINED. I’m exicted. Are you excited? And if site traffic doubles (or more) from current levels by the beginning of 2004 & doesn’t recede, ME’ll have more traffic in 2004 than it had in it’s combined history AGAIN! (Which, by the by, would be more readers than many printed periodicals receive.)
Still, there is a strange part of my mind that is reaching for a particular level of traffic… See, when Iain and I first put Modern Evil together, back in the fall of 1999, it was originally inspired by Goats. (goats.com, that is.) And at that time, goats.com was getting around 5000-6000 unique visitors every weekday. And that has been one of my aspirations for Modern Evil from the beginning; to reach that level of traffic to the site. To have content so compelling that that many people want to return to Modern Evil every day to see what comes next. Sure, by now Goats has significantly more traffic than that, and is even approaching profitability, a goal so lofty I dare not set it yet… but I’d still love to see ME reach 5k-6k unique visitors every weekday.
Which, by the by, is around 20 times the currently exceptionally, excitingly high level of traffic. So, a long way off. OR right around the bend, if we can somehow work up another spurt of exponential growth… Looking at the numbers to add them up for this post, I see that most days this month ME’s had more uniques than it had in most entire months between summer 2001 and summer 2002. So we’re now at more than 20 times more traffic than we were then, which like I said, is great. Exceptional! Exciting for me. (And for ME.) So that factor of growth is possible in a very short period of time. Even a second time, because of the power rule. Actually, if modern statistical analyses are to be believed, the next bout of exponential growth should be easier to come by than the first (though still not easy), and after that, it may never level off as long as the number of new people accessing the internet doesn’t level off.
err, that is… well… we’re already out of the lower 90%… we’re getting closer… but 2% of sites get over 90% of traffic, which means that the other 98% of sites (which ME still belongs to) have to share 10% or less of all internet traffic… but we’re up from the place where the lower 90% are fighting over hundredths of a percent of the traffic or less… we did our time there… I wonder if my old posts still exist somewhere… the ones where I laid out my vague plans for ME to become a multi-national media giant… In the last six months, we made the third big step in that direction, and hopefully in the next six months we can make another.
Am I babbling yet? Have you stopped reading? Am I boring? Am I egotistical and megalomaniacal? Whatever. Now I’ll go to the ‘extended entry’ field and type something… maybe something scandalous…
Like “Women are Evil”… ? ::wink::