The growth of the Dish has become harder to handle this year - a first-class problem, of course, but a real one. In 2006, we had 25 million pageviews. In 2007, we had 40 million. In 2008, that historic and exciting election year, the traffic soared to 120 million. As traffic quintupled, our editorial staff tripled to, er, three.
2009, we all expected, could not match 2008. The three-fold surge was so great it had to subside. We couldn't expect another round of sky-high traffic like that in the election months of the fall of 2008. But tallying up 2009 this morning - using the rough-and-ready Sitemeter counter, as in the other data - we ended up with around 110 million pageviews, a much smaller drop-off from last year than I expected. Our biggest month was last June, as the Iran coverage garnered a truly global audience of 13 million pageviews. But we've seen solid, consistent gains since then. This December, for example, produced 9 million pageviews; last December's total was 7.2 million. December 2007 gained 4.1 million. December 2006 racked up 2 million. Get the picture?
Keeping up with the audience and the pace has become extremely hard. Blogging for an annual audience of 25 million pageviews is just about possible for a lone blogger; catering to over a million unique monthly visitors is not. Without Chris and Patrick, I would have gone under this year with the sheer workload. Even with them, it is hard to contemplate a Dish future on this trajectory without adding more support. There's no other way. And we'll have to keep improvising.
So stay tuned. We have a plan.
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