I probably won’t be here at the computer when it happens because I have to run errands. But I reckon that by the time this post appears, Route 66 News will have logged its 1 millionth page view since its inception in October 2005.
There’s no prize to the person who hits the 1,000,000 mark, as there’s no way of knowing who that person is. But I thank every one of you readers wholeheartedly for supporting the site.
I suspected that Route 66 needed a one-stop, timely news source when I created it, and this site’s growth has only confirmed that.
Route 66 News gained its 100,000th page view in July 2006 — less eight months after it started. Since then, it took only about 19 months to log another 900,000 page views. That’s serious growth, folks.
Some stats:
- Route 66 News has created 2,601 posts since inception. I sought to average at least one post per day, but have gone well beyond that.
- Route 66 News has seen nearly 3,500 comments from readers.
- The site’s filter has stopped nearly 157,000 pieces of spam. The rate of spam has slowed, but it never stops, either.
- The most popular post is “A Route 66 Guide to the ‘Cars’ Movie,” which has seen nearly 84,000 page views since its inception in early June 2006. Even though the “Cars” movie has been out of theaters for more than a year and a half, that post remains the most popular nearly every day.
- The biggest day was June 23, 2007, in which 6,720 page views occurred. An estimated two-thirds of that was people seeking more information about “Popularity Contest” and “The Next Food Network Star” contestant Rory Schepisi, who was about to open a restaurant on Route 66 in her newly adopted home of Vega, Texas. About a half-dozen posts about Schepisi saw huge surges in traffic.
It’s been a lot of fun, and you folks have made it even more so. See you around for the next million or so.
Kudos Ron, on a job well done! When I logged onto Route 66 News just now, the blog counter was at 999,888. I won’t see the “odometer” turn 7 digits either but I will be back tomorrow to find more interesting tidbits about the one and only Route 66! Keep up the great work.
Our thanks go to you, Ron, for creating such a user friendly site. While I’m physically removed from the road now, I grew up near a stretch of it, and love following the news. Your blog is on my list of daily sites to hit.
Congratulations, Ron! Your website is an incredibly important part of information-gathering and information-dissemination for Route 66 enthusiasts and newbies alike. I know I’m responsible for hundreds of those hits! Thanks for all your hard work to keep the site continuously current and relevant.
Hey Ron:
Congrats on a job well done buddy. As I have said before, this truly is the BEST place on the web for current and historical info on the Mother Road.
No axe to grind (other than promoting preservation), nothing to sell, and a great selection of roadie music as well. All killer and no filler.
I still think you ought to be making a little coin here and there for all the work you put into keeping this page current, but those are the sorts of things that work themselves out in the long run.
Booya on hitting the million mark, and godspeed on hitting two million.
tim
Congratulations Ron!!! on your 1,000,000th view!!!
We check your site every day to keep us informed on anything and everything related to Route 66.
This is an invaluable news site and we hope to see it grow even more in the future.
Thanks again Ron for a job well done.
Your friends, Harley and Annabelle
Congratulations! You have a truly unique site; that and all the current updates are surely part of the reason for the milestone. I have a link on my homepage that gives me the headlines and a brief summary of each day’s stories, and I usually click for more information. You are providing a very important service to both roadies and the merely-curious-and-soon-to-be-roadies. Thanks, Ron!
This site is an invaluable resource, and, simply put, one of the one or two best Route 66 websites out there. Content, afterall, is king.
Thanks for the information and all the hard work, and here’s to another 1,000,000.
Congratulations on the milestone, Ron, and congratulations on a consistently readable and useful blog. Keep up the good and interesting work for a long time to come!
Bill Gates
Congrats on the big milestone and thanks for the effort you put into the site. I use the RSS feed and visit the site to read or comment on a post I’m particularly interested in. That actually turns out to be fairly often but it also means that I benefit from your newsgathering more often than I increment the hit counter. I’m sure there are other RSS users doing something similar so more headline reading has almost certainly occurred than even the rapidly climbing counter shows.
I knew it wouldn’t be long before you reached the million mark.
This is on my RSS as well. I visit whenever I’m on the web.
What is the average daily number of hits? Summer and winter.
Congratulations on a job well done. Your site sets the standard for any and all road sites. I know you must put a lot of time into this effort. It shows.
Roaddog, the number of page views has been remarkably stable all year — in the 1,400 to 1,600 range in both summer and winter. There’s a dropoff on Saturdays for obvious reasons, and I dropped below 1,000 for the first time in many, many months on Christmas.