Dan Schneider writes:
A little over 10.5 years, but Cosmo has hit a quarter billion hits on its main page: 250 million, and is on track for its biggest year yet, prob 50+ mill hits on the main page in a year. Yes, Amazon or Google does that in a few hours, but this is an arts website devoted to quality.
On my 1600 or more pages overall, the site has about 10 billion hits, but since people pinball around, searching for pages I've always felt that the main page's hits are a de facto barometer and equivalence to the actual # of people who have visited. The problem with advanced statistics is that they often get info cloaked from them and one site meter might detect only 10% of your hits while another gets 15% and they are TOTALLY unrelated. Then there are sites like Alexa, Ranking.com and others, which are useless, since they only track what their bots pick up, if you use their services. Then, indy sites are no better, as they only pick up a fraction of what they can sniff off Alexa.
Thus, I have always preferred the often derided simple old hits meter. Yes, how long someone is on a page may be missed, and while knowing 47 Nepalese looked at Cosmo last week might be interesting, it really matters not who looks at it but that it's out there. I have gotten hundreds of emails from college kids thanking me for essays they've plagiarized for good grades, dozens of emails from teachers who use essays as teaching guides, emails from sight-impaired folks who love that, unlike most commercial sites, my essays are easily scanned by their devices, I've gotten tens of thousands of Fuck Yous from deluded trolls and idiots, thousands of grateful emails, thousands of submissions of fiction and essays and literally 100s of 1000s of poem submissions, of only which the best of the best have made it. I've been stalked and sent viruses, I've been impersonated by people online for years, but Cosmo still keeps going, Hopefully, someday soon, someone will notice it's an Internet phenomenon. No porno, no Lowest Common Denominator crap, the best and most well read interviews in Internet history, an online radio show, and I could go on.
I think the next quarter billion can be hit by 2015 or sooner.
