On a cold autumn day in the year of our lord 2008, we set forward on a quest to create a site that mixed content in ways far few have done before.
OK, so it actually wasn’t quite that dramatic, but today marks the first birthday for The Inquisitr. The site launched May 5, 2008 (May 6 in Australia) with a mix of content that most people thought was insane, including me. The goal then, as it still is today, was to create a site that offered a “better mix” of tech, odd, entertainment and general news, a sort of newspaper lite model that hopefully delivered a good read.
As I type this post, Google Analytics says we’ve delivered 13,059,144 page views in our first 12 months. The real figure is probably around 13.3 million, as we’re missing about a weeks worth of stats from various periods, but I’m happy with 13 million none the less. Our other vital stats: Alexa 11,341, Technorati: 225, Compete: 3,907, Quantcast: 1,756, Australian Blog index: 2, Australian startup index: 8.
I’ve always preached that it takes six to nine months to establish a blog, although others, such as Jason Calacanis put the figure at two years. For The Inquisitr, the six to nine months proved spot on. The first six months were hard, we burned money without ever making a profit, and at the end of November the finances were getting very tight; notably we remain a completely independent site and have never taken external investment. Things though had started to turn in October, and by November we did our first 1 million page views month. By February, we broke the 2 million mark, and had at long last become cash flow positive.
Going forward we will continue to focus on content. We’ve just put on a third fixed writer and I’ll be exploring ways to build the team so that we can increase our coverage, and continue to offer a better mix.
My thanks to everyone who has helped along the way. To Steven Hodson and JR Raphael, you stuck by me during the dark hours, and I can never express my gratitude enough. To Meieli Sawyer and Minic Rivera, who are no longer with us, at to those who have guest posted or been syndicated (Robert Scoble, Mark Rizzn Hopkins and Eric Berlin are but a few) my thanks for your help. Last and most definitely not least: to you, our readers, who have made this crazy dream possible: we couldn’t have done it without you.