Since the creation of this website, it has been viewed by a progressively increasing number of people. In the past few months, however, things have really taken off. In fact, discrete page views doubled from January to February 2011 to well over 110,000 discrete page views monthly! Of course a single viewer will look at multiple pages so the number of unique viewers is smaller. Nonetheless I am very pleased.
The majority of viewers arrive as the result of a Google search. Since we are well indexed by Google, this is not a surprise. If I make a change in the website, Google reflects the change within the day. Although I suspect the majority of the traffic reflects interest by the greater Hasselbacher community, there is a tremendous amount of information behind the homepage about the other branches of my family, and indeed the hundreds of other maternal lines. Google appears to be able to see details of the public family tree. There is also an increasing amount of information about geographic factors.
This amount of traffic inevitably makes me think differently when I receive suggestions from Google to monetize the site by allowing them to place advertisements. I did not start this website to make money. However there are very real costs involved in assembling the information and keeping it on the Internet. What are your thoughts about this possibility?
Thank you for your support and contributions over these past four years.
Peter