07.25.16 Bears and Pageviews.
Some friends and I were planning a trip to Alaska, and naturally one of the topics of planning was bear safety. My friends assured me that they had no intention of trying to outrun a bear. All they planned to do was outrun me.
Their strategy is actually closely related to today's topic: pageviews for your website. According to Internet Live Stats, there are more than 1,057,811,700 websites online right now. (I can't find a reliable estimate of how many of these are in the United States, but in the neighborhood of half.) A number of other websites debate such questions as "How many pageviews per day are enough?" and "How many pageviews per day does it take to qualify as a big website?" Starting at the top, Google gets 220,943,456 people per month, according to Quantcast.* That works out to roughly 7,400,000 people per day. Ignoring the question of how a "pageview" is related to a "person," that means that to become #1 out of more than 1 billion, your website must somehow (probably by magic) start getting 8 million pageviews per day.
Maybe we should think about a more realistic short-term goal for our website than becoming #1 in the world.
I mentioned the other day that my other website gets about 1000 downloads a day. Ignoring the question how "downloads" are related to either "pageviews" or "people," this suggests that it gets roughly 30,000 pageviews per month, probably not all unique. Going back to Quantcast and doing a lot of paging down, I discover that 30,000 unique people per month should rank a site somewhere around #24,000 in the US. Two hundred unique people should rank around #50,000, and I'm pretty sure I get more uniques than that. So my website ranks somewhere between 24,000 and 50,000 in the USA.** Maybe that doesn't sound too impressive, but remember the bear: I'm running faster than more than a half a billion websites! So the moral is, you don't have to beat Google to be doing okay for yourself.
* Really, Quantcast? You are giving us an estimate to 9 significant figures??
** Actually, they don't list my site at all, which raises some questions about their rankings. But the principle still holds true.
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Bear Safety.
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