Celebrating 100,000 Readers

Celebrating 100,000 Readers We didnt expect this to happenâ€"especially not this fast. Cue the balloons, confetti, and cheesy celebration musicâ€"and join Ryan in his artistic interpretation  of the Electric Slide. We started this website on December 14, 2010, and now, nine months later, its hard for us to believe that The Minimalists has more than 100,000 monthly readers. We dont typically report our statistics because stats can be misleadingâ€"or twisted to paint an inaccurate picture. Plus we dont look at the numbers enough to report them regularly. We are, however, thankful tove reached this milestone in an authentic way: we dont use pop-ups, we dont spam anyone, we dont allow advertisements, we dont push products on you, and we want you to visit our site only if you find value in doing so. Which brings us to the stat were most proud of: over 10,000 hours per month, six minutes per visit: Sure, its nice to have 100,000 readers, but that number is arbitrary and can fluctuate like the stock market. Besides, total traffic is not nearly as important as another statistic that often goes ignored: average time on site. We think of this stat as the adding value meter.  Because we focus on adding value rather than getting new readers, were most proud of the following fact: the average person who visits our site spends over six-and-a-half minutes per visit. This might sound unimportant to most readers, but to put it in perspective: two minutes is good, three minutes is outstanding, and four minutes is almost unheard of in the online world once you have an appreciable readership. So, this statistic means that many people spend many hours on our site, reading through our journey and archives, applying our recipe to their own lives. You can think of it this way: if there are more than 100,000 visitors per month at this site, and they average more than six-and-a-half minutes per visit, then people spend over 10,000 hours per month here, which means we have the opportunity to contribute thousands of hours to people each monthâ€"helping thousands of people live more meaningful lives. So were not actually celebrating 100,000 readers; were celebrating over 10,000 hours of life-changing experiences each month, for which we are grateful. The most shocking thing about this growth is that we have been sort of ignorant: we didnt even know  how to start a blog a year ago; we didnt know how to design or code or do any of the cool stuff to make a website shimmer; and we didnt have any long-term goals or plans to reach a mass audience. We simply knew we wanted to add value to peoples livesâ€"thats why we started writing essays about minimalism. It turns out that when you add value to peoples lives, they share your message with their friends and familyâ€"adding value is a basic human instinct. Thank you for sharing, and thank you for your support. 2014 Update: After four years, we recently reached 4 million readers. Thank you! Lets keep growing together. If you dont already, you can subscribe to The Minimalists for free via email.