How many is a million? I guess it depends on your subject matter. A million dollars or a million Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls are great. I’ll take both. A million fishflies, not so much. I think we get that many on our office windows every time they hatch. And I suppose a million Web site visitors is what Google gets in the time it takes me to type the word Google. But for us, it’s a pretty big deal.

Dubuque365.com gets over a million visitors a year. Since Dubuque365.com
started nearly six years ago, we have grown steadily every year. I remember getting all excited the first time we had 365 people visit Dubuque365 in a day. It probably brought a tear to my eye. We thought we were really something. I think if I saw those kind of numbers now I’d start crying for a different reason. As we crossed a thousand, then two thousand and three thousand visitors a day, the growth seemed like more of a given thing than something to celebrate. As long as it kept going up, I was happy.

There’s never really the free time to sit and crunch the numbers and get a big picture. 3,000 people a day is a decent number, but when you step back and look at a year, it really adds up. For those of you who don’t manage your own Web site or follow tracking numbers, I can tell you that it’s not only a confusing mess, it’s also very hard to be extremely accurate. I have exact numbers in front of me, but what do they mean? If 2,985 unique IP addresses visit the site in a day, is that how many people are here? No, it’s not. If, say, 50 people from a big company like Cottingham and Butler all hit 365, coming through the same IP address and router with identical hardware setups, as often happens in large organized companies, I can’t tell them apart. I can see their hits and page views, but not how many actual people there are.

So we don’t try and we don’t estimate. We’ve always tracked on two criteria: Unique IP addresses and browser combinations. Beyond that, they’re all just one person. So when I see steady growth to 3,000 visitors a day, totaling over a million a year, how many people is it really? 10 percent more than we’ve accounted for? 50 percent? It’s exciting to think about, but impossible to claim. Kind of like how sometimes publications claim a readership based on 2.5 or three readers per issue. That’s crap. We print and distribute 7,000 issues of 365ink every time and get a couple hundred back each time when we pick up the rare extras left when a new issue comes out. How many people read those 7,000 copies? I don’t know, and I’m no better equipped to guess than you are. But we’ll say one; how’s that sound?

And how about Web site hits? Hits are the biggest misnomer in the world. Hits could be someone referring to unique visitors to a site, but often times people think that what they are seeing when really, they are seeing “document request” hits. (Slow down, egghead, you’re losing me!) A document request is a Web page request. But also, every image on that page is a document request. So a single visit to the front page of Dubuque365.com can generate 25-50 document requests, or hits. I’ve got enough experience now in numbers now to know when someone in a local band says, “My Web site gets 2,000 hits a day,” I know they really want to believe that 2,000 out of Dubuque’s 70,000 population hit their site everyday, but they’re living in la la land. Most of their hits probably come from robots like Google or Yahoo crawling their site.

At 365, we filter hits from robots and don’t even include our own staff’s hits to our site. We often generate close to 100,000 hits in a day at 365. Can I claim that many visitors? I wish. And, yes, that million people is to a great degree the same few thousand people visiting us daily or weekly and getting counted again the next day.

But let me say this: Thank you, thank you, thank you Dubuque for coming back to Dubuque365.com and 365ink everyday. It’s great to have you here, and we hope you enjoy your stay.