News : 6 million: Vinton Today readers, contributors help us reach another milestone

Sometime between midnight and 7:25 a.m. this morning (Saturday, June 8), Vinton Today readers viewed a little more than 1,000 stories.

At the end of those seven hours, the total number of stories read by you and thousands of others on this web site since we began Vinton Today in March of 2010 had reached 6,000,000.

We count our stories by something called page views; every time one reader clicks on a story to read it, that’s one page view.

We started counting on Day 1, March 11, 2010. It took us a little over a year to get our first million. When it first occurred to us to start counting total page views, in December of 2010, we had just passed the 700,000 milestone. We were very excited about that at the time, but our daily numbers were just beginning to grow.

We passed 1 million on March 15, 2011, an average of about 2,700 page views per day.

We reached our second million on Oct. 1, 2011, but have kept growing even faster since then.

We passed the 5 million mark on Feb. 4 of this year.

It’s took exactly 125 days to get from five to six million, so even a mediocre mathematician like me can figure it out in my head: 1 million divided by 125 is precisely 8,000. So, for the past four months and four days, our readers have looked at an average of 8,000 stories. Every day. For those of you who love statistics, that means that at that rate, Vinton Today readers will see 2,920,000 stories each year.

One of the recent changes you can see in Vinton today is our total number of stories read. At the top of our main page, on the bottom right of the blue banner that reads Vinton Today, you can see a continually running total

There are a couple of things about Vinton Today and our numbers that we think you should know.

First of all, everything on Vinton Today is local. The stories, the advertisements, the classifieds – all of it is from the Vinton area.

Second: We are the only people in Iowa – and one of the few anywhere – doing an online-only newspaper.

Yeah, of course, many newspapers have their web sites now. And there are some national businesses who try to collect local stories from newspapers and publish them on-line.

And like we do every time we reach a million milestone, we brag (just a little, I hope) and we say thanks.

Thanks to those first advertisers – Virginia Gay Hospital, Clingman and La Grange Pharmacies and Nature’s Corner – who got on board when this was just an idea, an experiment to see if a small town in Iowa could make something like this work.

Thanks to all of the advertisers who have joined since then.

Thanks to our two local funeral homes Van-Steenhuyse Russell and Phillips, for posting regularly all of their obituaries on our site.

Thanks to those of you who have contributed to our two fund-raising campaigns.

Thanks to everyone who has shared a story or story idea, or passed on a story you have seen or read here. Thank you to everyone who has shared photos.

Thanks to the more than 1,100 people who have signed up to read our e-mail every day and thanks to the nearly 1,500 who follow us on Facebook.

Thanks to the vision and computer expertise of the Monkeytown crew for dreaming up and building this web site.

Although I am the editor of this amazing adventure, I have always considered you to be the owner. That’s why everything we offer on this site is totally free.

And like the old baseball manager said while his team was winning: "In order for us to keep doing what we’ve been doing (winning), we’ve gotta keep doing what we’ve been doing (playing well)."

In order for us to keep on being the place people come for news, we’ve gotta keep on writing and taking photos and sharing your stories and photos here. And we need you to keep on sending us your information and keep on helping us the way you have been so well for so long.