Talking Chop

At some point today someone will be the one millionth visitor to Talking Chop. I joined the site as a blogger in February of 2006 when Joe "The Hammer" Hamrahi was the sole blogger. Talking Chop had only been in existence since August of 2005 and we were getting about 200 visitors per day. Since then, and since I've taken over the site full time, I've given myself small goals along the way; first trying for 400 visitors a day, then 1000, then 1500, and so on. I tried to build the site not through shameless promotion, but by letting the frequency and (hopefully) quality of what I wrote bring in more people and garner more links (though there were one or two incidents of shameless promotion over the years).

I've been lucky enough to have been linked by The Hardball Times, Baseball Prospects, MLB Trade Rumors, ESPN, SI.com, and many others. Each time I'd get a momentary bump in my daily visits, but when the visits returned to normal there were always a few more folks who must have kept coming back. It also doesn't hurt to be a part of Sports Blog Nation, the best and biggest sports blogging network on the planet. We all benefit from the extremely hard work everyone in that organization puts into making this unique platform to blog on.

It would be easy to say that I don't really do this for the page hits, but that wouldn't be entirely true because it's nice to know that people are reading. I also do this because I love having a public forum and a place to voice my opinion -- it's quite cathartic sometimes. What has added an extra level of excitement has been the increasing page hits, and lately it's gone beyond anything I thought would happen this fast. And with the increase in readership has come a ton of great new members adding their voices to the already great voices we've had here for years on TC.

The amount of visits per month doubled from December of 2005 to December of 2006, and they doubled again a year later in December 2007, but last year they almost tripled, increasing 176% from December 2007 to December 2008. This growth has pushed us to one million total visits, a nice round number that's something to be proud of.

So in typical fashion I've gone on way too long in this post. Ultimately I'd like to thank all of you who read and comment on the blog. You make this more than a blog, you make it a community, a place where we can ride the highs and lows of our beloved Braves. Thanks for coming around.

A future special thanks to Danny (RoyHobbs) for helping moderate, and to Joe (bigjoe) for taking on NAHWAL Chief this year (yes, it will be back). A special thanks to Matt (yondaime4) for helping out with the minor league stuff during the season, and of course to Joe Hamrahi, who is still doing great things over at BDD, for giving me this opportunity to begin with.