Celebrating our huge numbers, new look

The Livingston Post is sporting a new look, its first do-over in a number of years. It’s lighter, less cluttered and a good fit for our more magazine-y approach to covering the community. It also gives our unique content a nice display.

As I waited for the new site to override the old, I decided to crunch its traffic numbers. I thought I had made a big mistake in calculating, but no matter how many times I re-worked the math, I finally accepted that traffic on the site today is over 20 times greater than in May 2012 — when LivingstonTalk.com became The Livingston Post.

That’s a gobsmacking growth rate of over 2,000%! In eight years.

After The Livingston Post.com was born in May 2012, it got 50,000 page views in the seven months following. That averaged out to around 7,100 pages viewed a month, or about 238 a day.

Every single day back then — several times a day, to be honest — I’d hold my breath and check the site’s traffic numbers, praying that we hit at least 200 page views. That was my magic number, and on most days, we achieved that modest goal. But the site foundered a bit, and it wasn’t making any money. I took a part-time job, a fine job, but one that did not spark joy, and as time went on, I knew I had to make a decision: Quit the part-time job or quit The Livingston Post.

I quit the job.

I admit to a handful of days when I thought I had made the wrong choice. But then I look at the numbers: An amazing 2,000%+ growth rate over eight years. It feels good to know that our unique product — a mix of community information and entertainment, with a huge helping of opinion — has found its way.

And now, as we debut our new look, we proudly share that we’ve crossed the 1.5 million-page-view threshold already in 2020. We are averaging over 150,000 page views a month, or 5,000 page views a day. Traffic in the past few years has been so robust that we’ve had to move the site several times.

We went first to our own server in 2018; then, again in January 2019, when Buddy Moorehouse wrote about the 1975 KISS concert in Hartland. (If you’ve not the read the story, click on the link; you’re in for a real treat.) In a blink, that story went viral, getting so many page views that our server crashed. And crashed again and again, until we moved to an even larger server.

The third upgrade in servers came two weeks ago. The sustained, increased traffic on the site was slowing things down, and we didn’t have any room to grow. Now we do.

I smile to think about praying for 200 page views a day in 2012, when here we are now, averaging well over 20 times that. What a difference eight years makes.

The success of this site lies in its unique content, which is why I am thankful to have my very talented friend Buddy Moorehouse on board. After working with him for nearly two decades at the local paper, I can attest that few know and love this community as much as Buddy, and nobody writes about it quite like he does. I am grateful that Buddy is doing on The Livingston Post what he did at the paper for so long, and that he’s doing it solely for the love of the work.

Thanks, too, to you for reading. We plan to keep giving you the news and opinions and features that you enjoy, and we may be adding some new things, as well. We also feel privileged to give voice to your thoughts, concerns and opinions via the letters to the editor and guest columns you submit, as well as the comments you make on our posts.

I am so glad we all call this place home, and grateful that there’s even more room to grow.

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