Well, well, well. This is VentnorBlog‘s 10,000th published story!
Blimey O’Reilly. Strike a light. Would you Adam & Eve it?, etc, etc.
It seems like a crazy number of articles to publish in just over five years, but we’re often publishing up to 20 articles a day these days, so numbers like that have to follow.
How do you mark 10k articles?
What do you do for your 10,000th post, we wondered?
First thoughts were to highlight the 1st VB article; followed by the 1,000th; 2,000th; 3,000th story, etc, but as it turns out, the system we use makes if pretty hard to track them down easily … or any other way.
Thanking you
In the end, we’ve decided to focus on thanking the many, many people who have helped VentnorBlog become what it is.
Writers
Over those 10k articles, 334 people or organisations have contributed articles to get VentnorBlog to the 10,000th level. A huge thanks to them.
Story tipsters
Cheers to the massive support from the Isle of Wight community, who are our eyes and ears around the Island, sending in story tips to us, because – they tell us – they trust VentnorBlog to report the story honestly.
Photographers
We firmly believe that the art of photography is one that adds considerably to people’s lives, so whenever we can, we support photographers, showing their work to illustrate articles – both those living on the Island, and Flickr-users from around the world.
Thanks for your photographs. They have really lifted our articles.
Commentors
One of the things that we’re most proud of is the sheer number of comments that you have left on VB stories – 32,734 as we write this.
It really shows how connected people are to VentnorBlog.
VB commentors tell us that they really value a place to voice their opinions about what is happening on the Island. We’re really proud to be able to let people do it.
Donators
We’ll be frank, considering the considerable number of people reading VB, we haven’t exactly been smothered by people donating money to VentnorBlog – we guess that it’s just not in online culture yet, with most people currently thinking that stuff online doesn’t cost anything to produce.
We haven’t got praise high enough for the limited number of people who have supported VB through donations, with some of them not being wealthy people, but keen to keep VB going.
You truly are visionaries and your financial support gives us a huge boost when it arrives. Thank you.
Advertisers
Frankly, we’re not that commercially-minded (much to our personal detriment!). What drives us is the editorial – bringing Islanders news about things that matter to them.
We do have people approach us asking to advertise and we’ve had some amazing results for them. By way of illustrating that, here’s a comment from David Holmes, Chairman of the Garlic Festival after we did some work promoting them this year …
“These are tough times but the Garlic Festival is always looking for the most effective advertising spend.
“This year for the first time we tried VB, because it is now widely regarded as the Island’s fastest news source. We are glad we did, it really got us noticed and helped create a buzz around our event, reminding Islanders exactly what we have to offer.
“I would thoroughly recommend it to any Island business looking for cost effective advertising and outstanding value for money.”
Cool, eh?
(BTW – If you’re a commerical person with a track record, do get in touch and let us know what you think you could do to help us unlock in some of the enormous value that VB has.)
Readers & Traffic
Over the 10,000 articles, traffic has, not surprisingly, grown for VB.
We started with only 1,268 of our Web pages being looked at (pageviews) in the first month, this has continue to rise to a (current) peak of the crazy levels of 358,588.
All thanks to you, for reading VB.
The VB Forum
Last – but certainly not least – the VB Forum.
Not all VentnorBlog readers know about the VB Forum.
A big thank you to all of the 808 members of the VB Forum who have taken part in 3,432 discussion subjects, leading to 36,942 separate postings. These have been read by a much-wider audience, who have read the contributions hundreds of thousands of times – all in just over five years.
By way of an understanding of quite how many people read the VB Forum, take a look at the A Lighter Moment thread. Originally started by Farmersboy, its 760 post have alone been read a staggering 123,574 times!
What’s next?
We’ve got plans for some big changes coming up. This shouldn’t be a surprise when you hear that we haven’t even changed the site’s layout for the last three years!
We’ll be letting you all know about what we’re planning, so keep ’em peeled (as Shaw Taylor used to say).
Thanks again!
We hope this hasn’t come across too much like a gushing acceptance speech, given by an actress at an awards ceremony – that really wasn’t our intention.
We just wanted to say a massive, massive ‘Thank you!’ to you all from everyone involved with VentnorBlog.
