For the last 30 days, The Truth About Guns (TTAG) has seen a massive traffic spike. We went from about 1.4m to 1.6m pageviews per month in November and December (a comfortable lead over our competitors) to well over 2m pageviews per month. And we’re still going. With current trends I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit 3m pageviews per month by the middle of February. The short version is: we’re doing amazingly well with no end in sight. Make the jump for the long version.
For the first half of January, TTAG was chugging along at about 50k to 60k pageviews per day. We’ve been steadily gaining readers and that upward trend continues. The second our SHOT coverage went live the site traffic exploded.
During SHOT, 69k views per day was our WORST day that week: the Monday of Media Day at the Range, when we were too busy shooting to post (until the evening). Tuesday quickly became our #1 day for “most traffic in 24 hours” with 92,720. Wednesday stole that title with 110,329 pageviews. Thursday broke 100,000 but failed to make it to the top of the charts, and Friday (when the show was basically over) we brought in 88,277 pageviews.
Our SHOT Show coverage was the most widely read stuff we’ve ever done. In terms of that coverage, we four writers absolutely spanked the competition. While other bloggers were hoarding their stories for release in the coming weeks TTAG was publishing everything almost live, running between the show floor and the press room to bring you every story within 30 minutes of us being at the booth talking to the guys and fondling the products.
Like everything there’s a couple stories we missed, and we picked up a couple stories the competition missed, but at the end of the day if you read our blog regularly then you’ve got the whole SHOT picture by now.
As I said, 50-60k was our “standard” day before SHOT Show. A week later we haven’t dipped below 70k. Here are the numbers for the last 30 days:
- 951,304 Visits
- 648,347 Unique Visitors
- 2,022,710 Pageviews
- 3:00 Average Time On Site
I know that’s a little abstract, so let’s break it down a bit and compare these to magazine readership statistics.
- More people read our content than magazines, and they actually look at it instead of thumbing through. 648,347 unique visitors is somewhat comprable to the circulation of a magazine. Where Guns & Ammo Magazine sends their stuff out to 443k people who might read it, we have 648k+ people who come to us and who we know are reading our content.
- People care about our opinions and listen to our advice. 3:00 Average Time On Site means that people don’t just come to look at a picture and leave. Their eyeballs are on our pages for three full minutes while they look around; many of them doing this multiple times per day. They’re not just thumbing through as they would a magazine, they’re actually reading and thinking.
- More opportunities to present advertising than any other website. 2,022,710 pageviews means that 2,022,710 times in the past 30 days a person has been presented with an advertisment on our website. That’s 2,022,710 opportunities to tell someone about a new product, inform them about an oldie but a goodie, and grab their attention to boost your sales. Magazines typically only get read once, but our readers come back again and again.
According to these trends I don’t see any signs of us slowing down. We’ve reached a new “baseline” for traffic, we’re picking up readers left and right, and there’s no ceiling in sight. Life is good. If only we could get some more advertising money. Speaking of which, if you want to advertise ping guntruth@me.com for more information.