I'm not very good about celebrating birthdays or milestones. I've got my wedding anniversary ingrained in my mind, my wife's birthday is solid, but hell, I'm even a little bit iffy on recognizing my own birthday. My parents? Good thing I have a wife. My friends? Sorry guys.
So it should come as no surprise that we here at Silver Screen and Roll, under my lax leadership (in this respect at least), have failed to recognize some rather important milestones. Some time in December, the site got it's 1 millionth hit. In April, we turned one year old. In June, we picked up hit number 2 million. All major milestones, all swept under the rug like the crumbs from the bag of Kettle Chips I just consumed.
Of course we have reasons for this negligence. December wasn't particularly busy for the site, but behind the scenes Josh Tucker and I were already preparing for his unfortunate need to step aside. In April, the playoffs were starting. June? Don't get me started. So if you are wondering why we have chosen such a strange number to celebrate after bypassing more commonly accepted benchmarks, it's because this is the first one we've reached that didn't coincide with bigger fish to fry. What milestone do I speak of?
Sometime in the past hour (or the past 8 hours, I'm not actually sure) some lucky benefactor was Silver Screen and Roll's 2.5 millionth visitor. 2.5 million ... in 15 MONTHS. That's pretty damned impressive.
How impressive? Well, SB Nation is pretty big network of sports blogs. There's something like 250+ total blogs, one for every team in every major sports league in the US. They've got lots of soccer blogs, they've got blogs devoted to general sports, and some of SB Nation's blogs rank amongst the most respected in the blogosphere. Quick summary: SB Nation is a monster, made up of a network of monsters.
And, if you only consider blogs which started from scratch (some blogs, like CelticsBlog, existed in another form before transferring to SB Nation), SSR might be the fastest growing blog in SB Nation's history. I asked my boss if anybody had accomplished what we've done faster. It turns out this isn't exactly a known fact, but the only possibility he could think of was Bloody Elbow, which is only one of the foremost Mixed Martial Arts blog on the entire web. As a point of reference, Bloody Elbow had 1.9 million hits last month alone, and we might not have started out as fast as they did.
So take a moment to celebrate. Because this is as much or more about you as it is about the SSR staff. Sure, we work our asses off to provide you with great content (after working our asses off to make a living), but there's no way SSR grows as quickly as it has without an awesome array of fantastic members. We write the stories, we analyze the team, but it's you who have turned this blog into a community, and fine one at that. And it's not our stories that are being acknowledged, it's the size of your community.
So celebrate. Reminisce about your favorite SSR moments. Give yourself a pat on the back, crack open a cold one, and lean it towards your computer monitor, and say cheers. If you listen closely, you'll hear thousands of people saying it right back.