200 Grand

Within the last hour, Loaded Orygun recorded its 200,000th page view. Considering it took us about eight months to get to 100,000, needing exactly five months to get the next 100K is a pretty good sign. We got a big boost a couple weeks ago when we reported on Gordon Smith's vote against cloture on the non-binding Iraq bill. All of a sudden we started receiving a deluge of hits, on the order of about 20 a minute at its peak. It turned out that our recent acceptance as a purveyor of Google News had gotten the piece at the very top of the US News section, and then still as the top story on the subject of the bill, on and off for a few hours after that. When all was said and done, something like 5,000 page views had come and gone. We don't do that much business in a week, much less a 24 hour period!

There's surely a little personal ego involved when we put these kind of scoreboard-watching posts up, but I like them because they're another opportunity to marvel at the fact that anybody reads LO, and to thank them (you) once again for supporting advocacy journalism from the left here in Oregon. We'd probably still do it if no one noticed--I know I did for two years on other blogs(!!)--but it's much, much more fun that people do notice. And maybe along the way we've helped inform and entertain.

On to 500,000!