How I got 1 Million pageviews in 7 months | Hacker News Reader

How I got 1 Million pageviews in 7 months

3by9.com

23 pointsMrAlmostWrong18 comments

That works out to an average of less than 5000 per day. Not bad but also not that great. The good news is that there is an increase in the number of pageviews per day, so he seems to be on the right track but it's a long way to go before you could really call it a success from a traffic point of view.

Pageviews as a goal is not too great a metric anyway, better things (that result to some extent from pageviews) are turnover and conversion rates.

Just a few pageviews per day with a very high conversion rate (to paying customers) is a lot more effective than to simply trying to maximize pageviews alone.

I don't really understand the business model behind drawar, other than that it is a web design and developer community, there does not seem to be any attempt at monetizing that traffic (as far as I can see, maybe I'm wrong), which makes it even harder to appreciate the increase in pageviews, after all that makes it a hobby project (more pageviews -> more costs!) instead of a business. But he's on the the right track and if he adds a businessmodel and quadruples the number of pageviews he'll be able to pay for the hosting and have some money left over.

A business model besides the ads and the subscription service already in place?

I'm sorry I missed both, I did look for them (even while looking for them I still miss both of them!), and how does the subscription model work for you ? What's the breakdown percentage wise between ads and subscriptions ? Why do you focus on pageview so much ?

Retention and chargebacks are the interesting figures for a subscription based service, not pageviews.

"That works out to an average of less than 5000 per day. Not bad but also not that great."

Depends how much each page view is worth. That could easily be bringing in $10K+ per day depending on the business.

I really doubt there is a website business out there getting 2 dollars per page view.

Then why do you think there are people paying $40+ per click for traffic via Google Ads?

Wow, they must have better websites than mine, averaging about $0.04 / click.

If you are going the display AD route at some point. Visits are a significantly more important metric then page views for advertisers. They want to be seen by as many eyeballs as possible. Keep up the good work!

The million is a serious milestone, but pageviews[1] are still a shallow metric.

I wish him nothing but continued success, and his advice is spot-on, but I also hope he'll care more for promoting things like the number of people an item has been re-sent to from current readers, effects of efforts to encourage repeat readership, or any other metric that comes from the actions of that community. Dig deeper and segment your numbers, its well worth it!

[1] formerly known as 'hits' before people who do web analytics for a living exposed it as How Idiots Track Stats.

A pageview consists of many hits.

My pageview:hits ratio varies between 1:3 and 1:5, on a WP blog with minimal images, FWIW.

On Startups Lessons Learned (http://pt-br.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262672510) one founder from Dropbox mentioned as a metrics guide the "Startup Metrics for Pirates" (http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir...).

Yes, pageviews is the beginning, not the end.

Nitpick: hits and page views are not the same thing. A hit is just a request for a file. A page view is an entire page, and may consist of many hits.

1 million pageviews is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but just getting there for the first time is a still a big deal. Congrats, and I hope this founder finds that the first million pageviews is the hardest million.

1 million per month, though, and you've got full-time (equivalent) income potential (unless your site is in a low value niche). Heck, even half of that will do for high value niches.

Oh snap - I guess I shouldn't have tl;dr - ed. 1 million PV / month is awesome.

Congrats! What is your site built on?

(offtopic) The white drop shadow under the body text is quite annoying.

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