I need your help in accomplishing an important milestone in the four year history of this Urban Semiotic blog. As you can see on the right in the sidebar, we currently have (at the time I am writing this article), around 863,000 readers of this blog since 10/27/06 — that’s when we moved to WordPress.com from being privately hosted — and I am asking for your assistance to help us hit the ONE MILLION READERS mark on or before January 1, 2008!


Reaching a million of anything is an heroic milestone in any life endeavor and we would not even be approaching that incredible number without your continued and ongoing readership. We Thank You!
Here’s how the numbers break down to get us there from here:

  • We currently average between 1,000 to 3,000 readers a day.
  • We have 45 days or so before January 1, 2008.
  • We need to average 3,044 readers per day to reach a million.

Now that’s a lot of daily readers we need to average!
Can we do it?
I would like to try with your help.
Here are some things I think you might be able to do to get us to that readership milestone. We’ll be happy to add you to our Blogroll to send you some action in exchange:

  1. Get your friends and family to read us if they aren’t already and get them registered and commenting. New readers who have yet to discover us and read us on a daily basis is key to this hopeful success.
  2. Add our RSS feed to you webpage or blog or your internet portal. Please use this RSS address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/urb to ensure the best feed and the most choices for subscribing and tracking. If you’re on WordPress.com you can add our feed using an RSS widget in your sidebar. We can help you set that up.
  3. Write articles for us to create more original content to be read!
  4. Comment more to help create a discussion that will include other fine minds.

If you have any other ideas we should try to reach a million, please share a comment and let us know!

We are nothing without you and with increased support we might be able to swing publishing on the weekends again if there is enough interest in doing that — so please share your thoughts and please check in often to give us a little boost in your spare time — and we thank you again for reading!

34 Comments

  1. This is a wonderful project and goal. I just added a paragraph to our company newsletter about this. Would bring in a few new readers I think.

  5. One Million Served

    On my Urban Semiotic blog we are trying to reach the historic and substantial goal of ONE MILLION READERS by January 1, 2008. It’s pretty amazing we currently have around 863,000 Urban Semiotic readers in a little more than a

  9. Sammy!
    Please don’t say you’re kidding! Swear on Alvin’s name if you must! Your idea is too smart not to be incredibly successful! It would even help to provide the URLs of Sammy’s latest articles here to push those eyes online! 😉
    What is an “I Heart Rummage” show?

  10. UPDATE:
    We tried using MyBlogLog here in our sidebar to enhance our Reader experience and we dropped it when MyBlogLog refused to acknowledge or fix the problem of not matching the faces appearing in our sidebar with the appropriate image and username.
    iris and nicola and dananjay — to name a few — registered for that service but their beautiful faces never appeared here because other images and homepages were linked here by MyBlogLog instead.
    MyBlogLog blamed us, and WordPress.com, for the error and when we proved to them the matter was one for MyBlogLog to fix — they denied the trouble — and we immediately cancelled our account and our relationship with them.
    MyBlogLog is now owned and operated by Yahoo! — yet another reason in a long list to despise and hate those Yahooligans:
    http://tinyurl.com/2ujbk7

  11. I heart Rummage is a craft type of show where people who make things can sell them at their own tables. I and an artist business partner design one inch buttons which we show off to the world at our site, The Daily One Inch Button which would be so much better if we were really putting up a new button every day as we used to. Working on getting back on track with that.
    Anyhow, it’s the first Sunday of every month and I have already registered for the December show which and so I will diligently hand out information about this awesome blog.

  13. Look at the posts that have bought you the most traffic and post along similar lines.
    (My bet here is celebrity/ Jesus grave / and black chicks white dicks)
    Look at WP.com top posts and see what people there are reading/like to read. See what the trend is.
    If all else fails I am told cute kitten pictures work well 😉

  16. Is that a running total overall – or a daily running total ?
    The notable thing about this time period is that you have some big events coming up.
    Thanksgiving and Christmas …….. if I were on a mission I would be using them as well to the fullest advantage.
    How about a poll for the worst behaved celebrity of the year ?
    And how about a prize for the millionth reader ?

  17. That’s the total since we’ve been hosted on WP.com
    I think those big events are blackholes for readership because people are not at work reading us, they are offline having fun with their families. Readership always dies on weekends, holidays and over the summer months…
    A poll would be fun. Do you have a poll system you know that works on WP.com?
    I’m all up for a millionth reader prize — though there’s no way to tell exactly who is the millionth reader! 😀

  18. Thanks for clarifying how the *most read * works – I have never been sure.
    They are black holes for the days themselves – but the run up (ie now) is when people are looking for information etc . (Except Christmas Eve when I recorded my highest ever visitors last year)
    Maybe a product review or film review of the big films coming up.
    Ethical Christmas – Responsible Christmas, Christmas and global warming – best gifts for X, Y & Z. Your Christmas wish list .
    Please note here I am not talking a flood of posts – just maybe a once a week thing ?
    You must be able to make Christmas work for your blog !
    If you cannot tell who is the millionth reader – would a screen shot of the web page with the magic number on work ?
    Not sure about polls and WP.com – there must be some that are not script based – maybe a look in the WP data base?
    How about the good old blog engines ? I have some Blogmad credits if you are still on there – although that has gone very quiet.

  20. I had forgotten about blog explosion – I know they were heading down hill fast – I haven’t even looked since I got the new computer.

  21. Yeah, they really crashed. I’ve had two blogs there waiting for approval for over 3 months.
    I don’t think any of the blog traffic exchanges are doing very well any longer. I think that idea has pretty much died.

  22. The one sending me the most traffic is Bog Soldiers .
    Sounds like a cue for a post on the demise of traffic exchanges ……… What killed the Blog Exchange?
    You could of course join Thursday thirteen or Wordless Wednesday ………………… flees like the wind ………………………………………..

  23. I used to be with Blog Soldiers. They didn’t give us much traffic, though.
    Blog Exchange was killed when it was sold. The original founders were great. The new owner seems to not be found.
    I’m running away from those meme-me-thangs, too! 😀

  26. Excellent, Sammy, thanks!
    I subscribed to that feed, too!
    Now my WordPunk blog is on TypePad — but I still don’t really understand the difference between LiveJournal and VOX. Can you explain it?

  31. Hello, Mr. Gordon —
    Sometimes the counter slows/stops updating and you have to “turn it off” for a few days to get it to start properly updating again.
    It’s back for now. We’ll see if it stops for a day and a half again. 😀

  33. We came so close: We hit a million at 12:18am on January 5, 2008!
    If we had open commenting, we would’ve hit that milestone two months ago. Doing it with closed comments and missing the happiness by four days is not a big deal.
    THANK YOU!

  34. Pingback: Evaluating Lost Blog Readers: Ten Million vs. One Million « Boles Blogs

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