May 2007 Monthly Update

The big news for us this month was subscriber growth. We left April with an active circulation of 1,868,702; in May we not only passed the 2 million mark but ended the month with a circulation of 2,523,249 - that's 35% growth in just 31 days.

Wow.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, web site metrics were also strongly up: May saw over 575,000 visits (up nearly 19% over April's 484,000) and 1,473,000 page views (up nearly 14% over the prior month's 1,294,000).

Last month I introduced a new set of metrics to add more perspective. Here are April's numbers again:

• Total messages sent: 16,820,525
• Average messages sent / day: 560,684
• Peak daily messages sent: 727,143 (April 10)

We blew these away big time in May:

• Total messages sent: 22,005,020
• Average messages / day: 709,840
• Peak daily messages: 1,246,772 (May 31)

Not all was goodness last month; while we were growing like crazy an apparent hardware issue at our hosting service took one of our servers down; not good news. This placed considerable strain on the remaining systems which, frankly, showed - mailing and web site performance crawled. We've been doing some work since to reduce the impact of this kind of failure in the future. The large increase in circulation has also seen some changes in how some larger users are using FeedBlitz's facilities: we're going to take that into account as we move forward too.

Updates

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we introduced new features and updated others, including:

• Adding an additional Twitter option
• Enabling "Email to a Friend" without a login
• The new Referrer's Report
• Article ratings, powered by outbrain
• (My personal favorite) Recent post summaries

So if you haven't yet checked these out, do, because June is going to be a very exciting month for us and new capabilities. Better get ready...