Twittering Machines is my job. I know you probably knew that but it’s relevant to the subject at hand—TM is having its best year yet as measured by how many people find their way here every day.
In terms of numbers, TM has seen a 40% increase in unique visitors year-to-date as compared to last year, last month was our best yet, and the last 30 days were even better.
I want to thank you—everyone who’s reading—for choosing to spend some of your time here which helps allow me to do this work full-time. It is a blessing and I thank my lucky stars every morning when I walk into the Barn.
I also want to thank the companies who choose to advertise on TM for obvious reasons—you cannot have a job without income.
In terms of site traffic numbers I’m going to keep that private with a few exceptions—I share a screen shot of our monthly visitor count from Cloudflare, a CDN service we use, as part of our Rate Sheet and I also share the same with Patrons when we reach a new milestone as we did a few days ago.
While I’ve written about the difficulties of getting accurate website traffic numbers before, it bears repeating as I’ve seen some references to data from Similarweb, a website that offers free (and paid) access to the data they collect.
From the TM About page:
Site Traffic
TM uses Cloudflare’s CDN (Content Delivery Network) for a number of reasons including improved user access worldwide as well as additional layers of security. As such, website analysis services including SimilarWeb and SEMRUSH do not have access to this CDN for security reasons making their site traffic data for TM incomplete, i.e. not accurate. A screenshot of our actual traffic data from Cloudflare is included in our rate sheet.
All of this is public information—just search “How to Whitelist Similarweb on Cloudflare” where you’ll find the steps needed to allow their crawlers access and how not doing so results in incomplete data. [footnote 1]
My plan going forward is to keep doing what I’ve been doing for the past 15 years with an eye toward improving the work I do (and love).
Cheers.
1. Of course the whole story is more complex. Companies like Google now have their crawlers doing double duty gathering data for search results as well as for their generative AI services and features so if you block access to stop their AI overviews from showing up in search results, something that is easily done in Cloudflare, you also disappear from Google’s general search results. Other companies are doing the same and I find the practice irritating.