I’ve been learning some interesting things about how Google’s website traffic calculations work, and it explains a lot. A more realistic view comes from my hosting company, which tracks the actual number of unique IPs per day after filtering out bots, spam, and other similar traffic. They do this in part because the cost of hosting is affected by traffic. They attempt to calculate the actual number of legitimate user visits to the website.
Success was always going to mean more operating expenses, and I’m here to tell you that we’re experiencing some success!
Number of Unique IP Addresses per day – WPE
America Turns 250 Next Year and The ‘Grok Turns 20 – You Support Us, We Support America!
To provide some context, when we first moved the website last year, the daily average of unique IP visits reported by the hosting company was around 3,850-4,500. We’re averaging 14,159 as of today, and since mid-June, we’ve experienced a hockey stick-like ascent, having nothing to do with CO2 or those toadies, Al Gore and Michael Mann (except where we’ve written about them and attracted new readers as a result).
14.5K/day is approximately 5.3 million “visits” per year. If we reach an average of 32,000 per day (the top of the current graph), that’s over 11 million a year, or nearly a million a month. I was hoping we’d hit 2.5 million for all of 2025. I think we’ve already busted that.
Google won’t agree, but as our Hosting company reminds me, they generate their data to sell ads. That’s all it’s for. I’m not selling ads, even though we need them to raise some money to help cover costs.
Google matters for search, and since we wouldn’t buy what the Covidiots were selling, they punished us and still do. We have other issues we’re actively working to correct to address that as best we can.
Other Boring Website Stuff
Another metric that matters is Domain and Page Authority or DA and PA. Moz rank. External links back to the site and a host of other SEO metrics play into the calculation, but this figure is critical to measuring website content “influence” or value, and we’re moving on up, to quote Mr. Jefferson (George, not Thomas).
It’s been a struggle to get back here since Facebook significantly reduced our audience in early 2020.
Recent investments in addressing some SEO issues (as noted above) will help us improve in this area, and we’re committed to continuing to deliver the content, including local podcasts, more from me, memes, and your op-eds, press releases, and letters.
I do, of course, have to ask anyone who can to please consider donating to help us maintain this momentum. Larger donations get the job done quicker, but even a 5$ or 10$ a month subscription is a huge help.
I’m still committed to ensuring as few cluttery and annoying ads as possible, but we need more donors to keep that “noise” as quiet as possible. Maybe this will help.
GraniteGrok is the only media site in New Hampshire, possibly all of New England, that is 100% uncompromised in any way by its advertisers or promises of political access. That means no story is beyond us because someone might pull ads or access.
We can print the uncomfortable truth and challenge the establishment, regardless of who or which party.
I think the founders would have liked that.
We hope you do as well.
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