September 24, 2004

Surge

This has been an amazing month for HobbsOnline, with traffic counts surging to new highs for this blog. Already this month, HoL has been read by 37,000 different people, according to AwStats, generating more than 1.5 million page views. Based on the numbers over the last few days, I expect the number will cross 40,000 by the end of the month. Memogate has been a big driver of traffic, and HoL has seen its daily unique visitor counts above 1,000 for 14 straight days, according to Bravenet stats, averaging more than 3,000 per day over that period.

In addition, the blog has sent out 34,000 RSS feeds. And the number of other blogs and websites linking to HoL has risen 10 percent in the last three weeks - more than 400 other blogs now link.

The OpinionJournal.com advertisement on the upper left corner of my blog was placed on Sept. 10. Blogads stats say it has been viewed nearly 20,000 times since then.

Google AdSense, which serves up content-related ads on my homepage and all internal pages, counts 90,000 page impressions from September 10 through today, and more than 116,000 for the entire month.

Any way you slice the traffic, HobbsOnline is having its best month ever.

This post from Sept. 17 has already been viewed more than 13,000 times.

Subscriptions to the HoL daily email alert - which is free and goes out once each morning if the site has been updated in the past 24 hours - crossed the 100 mark in the last few days. Thanks to you if you subscribed!

Thanks also to each of you who have made a donation via the PayPal tip jar in the last several weeks. Strangely, I haven't received a single donation via the Amazon tip jar in months. I don't aim to make a living with this blog, but it sure is nice to receive donations given out of appreciation for what I do here - and they help cover the bandwidth charges.

I'll never pull an Andrew Sullivan on you and threaten to stop blogging if many of you don't immediately donate $20. But if you are a regular reader and user of HobbsOnline, please consider this: Time is a liberal news magazine that comes out only once per week. A subscription costs $30 per year. Newsweek is a very liberal news magazine that comes out weekly and costs $42 per year. HobbsOnline publishes almost every day and - unlike Time and Newsweek - allows you to participate via posting comments. And, unlike Time and Newsweek , I give you links to source documents and to other blogs and publications, enabling you to access a much broader and deeper scope of information and commentary than they ever have or will.

If just 100 of my regular readers would donate $2.50 a month - about the cost of one year of Time and less than the cost of one year of Newsweek... well, enough said about that.

Besides donations, you can also support this blog when you shop at Amazon.com, simply by coming here first and then clicking the "Shop via Amazon" link in the tool bar near the top of the page. Thanks to dozen or so of you who did that last month.

You can also indirectly support HobbsOnline by patronizing the blog's advertisers.

And if you would like to reach the growing audience here at HobbsOnline with an ad, I invite you to place one in any of the three Blogads strips, where prices for one month range from $40 to $65. Special offer: Place an ad before the end of September and send me an email mentioning this post I'll give you an extra two weeks for free.