The Truth About TTAG: Q3 2011

Constant growth is something that’s nearly impossible to accomplish, especially in these troubled economic times. Thankfully we don’t have that problem. TTAG’s readership has been steadily growing, nearly exponential at points, ever since Day 1. It’s almost like there’s a Soviet политрук shouting “NOT ONE STEP BACK!” at our stats page every day, forcing that line ever higher. As is becoming our custom, I just wanted to take a moment out of our busy schedule to reflect on our awesomeness and give a little insight into what is driving our popularity.

I can already hear the complaints now (mostly from readers whose own sites aren’t doing quite as well): “enough already, parading your stats around is the height of hubris!” Yup, we know. We’re special like that. And until we’re making enough money from advertising to pay the writers (A.K.A. feed me) we’re going to keep at it. The moral of the story is if you want to see fewer of these “LOOK AT HOW AWESOME WE ARE!” posts start handing us money.

For the last quarter, which includes the time between July 1 and September 30, the site saw:

• 2,703,012 Views
• 1,372,072 Visits
• 755,862 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 2:39 Average Time on Site

For just the last month (August), our site saw:

• 916,472 Views
• 475,489 Visits
• 315,158 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 2:32 Average Time on Site

That’s very nice. Let’s take a look at a chart comparing this past qurter to the previous quarter.

Mmhmm, just the way I like it. This quarter’s numbers (blue) are higher than the previous quarter (green). So, what’s driving this traffic? Where do all these people come from? Here are some interesting facts about our site’s traffic.

• Only 16% of daily traffic comes from content published that day. The vast majority of our traffic is from articles we posted long ago and either found on Google or linked by another website. In other words, even if we were to completely stop publishing new content we would still have 750,000+ views per month.
• Gun Reviews are the most viewed content. Political articles and news articles are extremely popular within two weeks of publication but fade away into obscurity. Gun reviews stay relevant for decades, and have helped inform countless purchases by consumers.
• September 29, 2011 was the busiest day ever. Mr. Kozak hit gold with this article, which made its way around the internet and racked up 16,101 views by the end of the day. Total views for the day was 45,979. That single article accounts for a grand total of 20,275 views since publication.
• This is the most popular article of all time. Sad, I know. This is #2.
• Our least popular article of the day (now) gets more views on a single day than our entire first month worth of articles combined. That’s just awesome.

For advertising, contact Robert Farago at [email protected].