Category — v. Press Room

Dear readers, thanks to all of you for an awesome year!

Almost 800,000 of you stopped by this year–more than three times as many as in 2010, and more than 12 times as many as in 2009.  You are currently stopping by at a rate of 150,000 visits a month–thank you, thank you, thank you.

The site had its millionth visitor in November 2011, and its 5 millionth page view and 3000th comment in December.

Almost 50,000 of you are frequent visitors–up from 12,000 last year.

In 2011, you came from more than 14,000 communities in more than 180 countries and territories

I am humbled by your visits, and will keep trying to make the site better, and to add useful, new, interesting, and different material.

TOP 10 PLACES YOU COME FROM

More than 75% of you come to this site by a search engine.

Of the rest, about 1/3 of you come directly, by typing the site’s url or clicking on a bookmark, and about 2/3 come via a link.

Those who came from a link came from one of more than 50,000 links from more than two thousand different domains.

Excluding search engines, Facebook, Yahoo Answers and such, the following are the top ten domains you came from in 2011: [Read more →]

For a bit of shameless self-promotion about this, see this press release.

For a comic bit from Carl (of the great site Dad’s Guide to WDW), making fun of my shameless self-promotion, see this.

Sometime today, this site’s millionth visitor will stop by. 

Whoever you are, I hope the site helps you, is interesting, or both! And thanks for visiting!

I could not have imagined this number of visitors when this site launched with the thought that first time visitors to Walt Disney World could use a little more assistance than they were finding, and that maybe I could help them out.

Thanks to all of you who have visited, asked questions, posted comments, disagreed with me and thus made the site better, emailed your friends about it, liked it on Facebook, plussed it on Google, provided wonderful puffery, linked to it on message boards, cited it in newspapers, and posted about it on your own blogs and websites!

You energize and inspire me, and thanks for all your help…

Humbly, Dave.

Frequent readers of my disclosure page 🙂 will have noted that last week I inked a deal to become an affiliate of TouringPlans.com.

I’ve been recommending the tools and resources of TouringPlans.com for more than three years.

Over the same period I’ve published at various times frank reviews of their stuff. I’ve never found TouringPlans.com to be perfect, just simply much better than any alternatives.

The affiliation won’t change this–I’ll still publish reviews and call ’em as I see ’em–but it does mean that if you sign up for a TouringPlans.com fee-based product after arriving there from a link from this site, TouringPlans.com will share a bit of the fee you pay with me.

I’m grateful that TouringPlans.com has created the opportunity to become an affiliate, as it permits me to be compensated a little for the time I put into this site while still recommending and reviewing their products.

Thanks to Dave Lavender at the Herald-Dispatch for his link to the site in this article!

Recently this site passed its third year of operation.

Readers of last year’s birthday message will recall that I’m a little vaguer than I should be about when the site launched…

Going forward, I’ve decided that the official site anniversary will be April Fool’s day–it just seems fitting!

(This birthday post would have gone up on Friday, April 1, 2011, but I had more important news to relay that day.)

By coincidence, the site also had its half a millionth visitor March 30.

Three years old is a big deal at Walt Disney World–it’s the age at which a child can no longer enter the parks for free, nor not be counted against a hotel room’s capacity limits.

It’s a big deal here as well–even after three years, you continue to come to the site, to tell your friends, to post about it on message boards, and to link to it on your websites. 

Thanks to you, right now the site is running about 2,000 visitors a day; 12 months ago it was around 425 visitors a day; 12 months before that 160; and three years ago (more or less 🙂 ), when it opened, it was about 30 a day.

I’m grateful for and humbled by your readership and your kind words…thanks!!

Dave