This blog began publishing on April 2, 2006, and it took us until May 31, 2007, to receive our first 100,000 visits from our readers -- a total of almost 14 months, but still an astounding feat for a specialized publication, blowing the accomplishments of all other Russia blogs that had come before right out of the water.

Last Friday, more than two months shy of our second anniversary, we collected our 200,000th visit from a reader -- which means it took us less than eight months to collect our second 100,000 visits; in other words, our traffic over our second year has been nearly twice as high as it was during our first.

Web pages created by this blog (which, as of December 19th, numbered over 3,000) have now been viewed by readers almost half a million times in the period of less than two years we have existed. If you consider the traffic we generate on Publius Pundit and Pajamas Media, it becomes abundantly clear that we are the most significant Russia bloggers in the world in terms of traffic (with our fearless leader Kim Zigfeld being first and foremost among us, of course).

Another thing our counter doesn't record is visits to our backup blog on Wordpress, a format some readers prefer. Amazing as it seems, on January 8th the counter on that blog caught and passed the counter on venerable Russia blogger Vilhelm Konnander's actual blog, which has existed much longer. That's right, our backup blog, whose only purpose is to safeguard our data and whose contents are often weeks out of date, is more popular -- far, far more popular -- than Konnander's actual blog. Rather odd, then, that his blogroll doesn't even acknowledge we exist, isn't it? Perhaps it's a clerical error.

The average reader who visits this blog spends over four minutes perusing our content, an astoundingly long period by blogosphere standards.

And YOU are responsible for all this impressive data, as we've said many times before. This is YOUR accomplishment as much as it is ours, especially if you are a regular reader and/or commenter.