One Million Views! A Blog about Our Blog

When I was a little kid I remember riding in the back of the family station wagon as we drove past the local McDonald's, looking up and wondering, "How in the heck do they keep track of the number of people that eat there?" The old sign used to have a spot for a rotating, ever-changing number. Did they save all the receipts from all the restaurants around the nation? If so, who had the job of sitting there to count them all up? Did McDonald's have turnstiles? I'd never seen any. Just how did they keep track? Or maybe it was just sheer marketing genius. Such were the thoughts of a young boy whose family usually bypassed McDonald's in favor of picnic lunches at the nearby park.

Here I am many decades later and I wake up this morning only to stare at another number--1,000,000!  Yep, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation blog, Elk Tracks, just rolled over that pageview milestone sometime overnight.

We launched the blog in September of 2012 with a post about a winery in Washington state that, still to this day, donates a portion of its proceeds to a local RMEF chapter. Since then, we made an additional 427 posts about all sorts of things including RMEF habitat stewardship and volunteer projects, calls to action, official comment letters, feature stories, newsy issues and highlighted videos.

In this day and age, we don't have to guesstimate how many people take part in a given activity--in this case, reading an Elk Tracks blog post. Nowadays it's all about analytics. Thanks to the sophisticated, high-tech gadgetry of the Internet, pageviews are broken down by blog post, source, browser, operating system, referring site, keyword, country and by frequency--today, yesterday, this week, this month and all-time. It's all pretty amazing.


So let's do our own little analytical breakdown. Below are the blog's top five most popular stories. Just click on the hyperlinks to read them and see the photos and videos:
1. Integrity Shines Through, Young Hunters Rescue Elk Calf from Wallowy Fate (74,100 views)
2. A Deer Tale to Top ALL Deer Tales! (53,761 views)
3. Hunters Motivated by Meat, Elk Does a Body Good (26,590 views)
4. The Biggest Bulls You'll Probably Never See in Person (22,161 views)
5. When Anti-Hunters Attack (20,585 views)

Pageviews by country (as of 6/3/2016):

Pageviews by operating system

1. United States        824,202
2. Norway                  35,370
3. Canada                  22,835
4. United Kingdom     18,349
5. France                    10,652
6. Russia                    10,443
7. Ukraine                    9,102      
8. Germany                  8,285
9. Australia                   2,397
10. Turkey                    1,600

Pageviews by frequency (as of 6/3/2016):

Pageviews by browsers

Today                      2,007
Yesterday                  629
Last Month           40,736
All-Time           1,001,819

The bottom line is we at the RMEF are grateful to be in the business of conserving elk and elk country. It is a noble calling. And we're grateful for so many people from so many places who reach out to us and support our mission in so many different ways. It is indeed a good day!

Hmmm...think I may celebrate it with a McDonald's burger.

(Check that! I think I'll celebrate with an elk burger on my own barbecue instead!)

Mark Holyoak
RMEF Director of Communication (and burger lover)