T-Squared: Trib Traffic Up 150% Over 2010

We've just ended the first half and second quarter of 2011, and as has been our standard practice since we launched, that means it's time to share our latest stats on site traffic.

It's all good news, fortunately. The headline is that our traffic in the first six months of '11 was 2.5 times what it was in the equivalent period last year. That major jump can surely be attributed, at least in part, to the legislative session, but we take it to mean that, generally speaking, the content model is working.

(The business model is working too; that's fodder for another post, but since we get so many questions about our fundraising, I'll simply say that we're at about $9.3 million raised and ahead of our budget projections for the year on nearly every count. Membership and corporate support are especially robust.)

Before I compare the first-half numbers, here's how we did in Q2:

Total visits: 2,550,678
Unique vistors: 1,351,278
Page views: 11,227,570

Each of those stats represents a double-digit-percentage improvement over Q1.  Total visits are nearly 40 percent higher.

Here are the numbers for the first half of 2011:

Total visits: 4,434,199
Unique vistors: 2,287,317
Page views: 21,017,359

By comparison, here are the first-half numbers for 2010:

Total visits: 1,608,521
Unique vistors: 903,951
Page views: 8,641,455

That's a roughly 150 percent increase in each case — which is awesome. I knew our traffic was up year-over-year, but  I wasn't aware that it was *this* up.

I'll be curious to see if that growth pattern holds in 2012, a non-session year, but with 181 members of the Lege and 32 members of Congress up for re-election, everyone with the last name "Williams" running for the four new Congressional seats and a certain someone possibly running for president, I like our chances.

In any case, thanks so much to our friends and fans out there for fueling our growth.