We hit another big milestone this morning: 150,000 readers! Thanks folks. Keep coming back and help spread the word! One way you can do that is to email links to our stories rather than the entire story. I would note here that it took us a year to get to 100,000 readers but only a few months to get to 150,000 readers. All good stuff.
Back in August we announced plans to require registration in order to comment. At the time I wrote:
The effect, however, of allowing only registered users to comment is an initial drop in comments and traffic. My experience is an 80% drop in comments and 20% in traffic — initially. After a few months comments will surpass the previous numbers and traffic will jump.
As the following charter shows, traffic declined in August, September and October but has rebounded to a level higher than before. July is an outlier (albeit, a nice one) where we had a surge in traffic when a couple of our stories went “national”. If you ignore that you see a traffic go up in the months prior to the switch, then a decline and now an uptick which is likely the result of some percentage of previously unregistered commenters taking the time to register. In either case, it is a good trend and precisely what we were hoping to see.
