I just checked our web server logs and was amazed to find the biggest
increase in hits we've had thus far.

We are now getting 600,000 hits to our server each month.  Two months ago
(last time I checked) we were getting about 350,000 hits/month.  So far, we
have never experienced a decline in hits...of course this may be a
reflection of the explosive growth of the Internet itself and may have
little to do with us.

Here is a very crude estimate of actual visits:

NHM Home Page           18,169
Cats Web Site           11,532
Museum Directory        11,201
Page Home Page          4,451
Petersen Home Page      4,118
Africa Web site         2,996



These numbers represent actual visits to "entry points" to our web pages.
Africa is doing pretty well for the short time it has been up and the bulk
of the visits are to the Synthia Saint James art exhibition.

The increase in hits may be due in part to an influx of traffic from both
webTV and AOL.  AOL contacted me and asked permission to link directly to
our site from their web browser.  They felt that we had a great deal of
"family" centered content.  We've actually received many notes indicating
that people are pleased to have a "child safe" site to visit.  We've also
been featured twice in the last couple months as a "Cool Site of the Day".
We also receive a significant amount of non-domestic traffic and have
recently started to get a fair number of hits from Mexico and Brazil.

A big change is that the NHM and Cats pages now get more hits than the
Museum Directory.  The Museum Directory was originally created as a tool to
bring people to our site.  It is a list of several thousand museum related
web sites.  I am very pleased to see that our own content is now a bigger
draw than the museum directory.

I know we get a lot of hits and the fact that we've been on the web for a
while contributes to this number, however, the growth is far faster than I
expected and I would like to know what's happening at other museum web
sites.

What are your current number of hits/month?  What is the rate of increase?

Although I am delighted with the explosive growth of our web page, we will
soon start to run into hardware problems.  I expect we'll have to upgrade
our hardware much sooner to handle the traffic, and this is expensive!

Jim



Jim Angus
New Media
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
900 Exposition Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA  90007

http://www.nhm.org

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When they told me I was average, they were just being mean.