World Vital Records President David Lifferth keeps the company well informed about our key metrics. I got this information from him yesterday in an email:

"Yesterday, Jan 8th, we set an important traffic record on WVR. For the first time ever, we surpassed 300,000 page views in a single day. We had 336,665, which was a big jump over our previous best of 294,000. The last record was set in Nov 27th, 2007. We had come within a few thousand page views of that record for every day so far this month. I knew we were going to break that old record any day. The newsletter and the chatter about our 2 million We're Related users was enough to push us into record traffic territory. We also set a new unique visitor record at 22,272. The day before on the 7th, we had came in 2nd to beating the previous record of 20,630 with 20,174. This new traffic has Omniture projecting an 8.2 million page view month. December was our previous best with 6.3 million."

Our Worldvitalrecords.com Quantcast chart should look really good when the Jan. 9th numbers come out. We should pass 400,000 monthly unique visitors for the first time.

A year ago, we averaged 50,000 unique visitors in January and February, so our overall traffic has grown eight-fold in the past year. Perhaps we will be able to double or triple again this year, and reach more than a million visitors per month by the end of the year.

Also, our FamilyLink.com site traffic (a social network for genealogists) has nearly doubled this year, and our new development team in India is close to rolling some significant improvements to the site.

Finally, our whole company is working hard to get ready to launch an important collection of international databases. You'll hear more about that later this month, but I think a lot of genealogists will be really happy with our new collection.

I never get over the magic of the internet and the power of internet marketing that allows a small startup company to launch a web site and build something valuable for consumers, and then to watch the traffic pour in.

At CES eBay ads said nearly a quarter of a billion people buy things on eBay and Yahoo talked about 500,000,000 users worldwide. I can't imagine being a part of a company that size; but I'm still thrilled by small numbers like "millions."