Bit Rebels 2nd Birthday: Our History Presented

So we finally reached the day! This is the only day that we will celebrate our second birthday, and we’re totally psyched about it! Since it’s our second birthday and all, it means that it was 730 days ago that Bit Rebels opened its doors to the public. Since then, we have been grinding away writing 6 articles per day for your entertainment, and we can only hope that you guys have enjoyed it as much as we have. It’s been a huge undertaking, but it’s been fun all along this adventure. I sometimes reflect over what I would have been doing if Bit Rebels was never to have existed, and I can honestly say that the ideas have been many; however, none are as strong as the concept of Bit Rebels itself.

Now, it’s always a challenge to write a birthday article because you never know what exactly to put in it. So, we’re celebrating, right… now what?! That’s really what it feels like writing this post, but there is of course always room to present some history and statistics. Being a huge statistics fan myself, I can’t imagine that anyone wouldn’t like statistics, so maybe I’ll include some of that in this article.

But first, there wouldn’t be a Bit Rebels if it wasn’t for you guys, the readers. If you weren’t as loyal and supporting as you really are, we would have no momentum and probably wouldn’t be able to keep this whole thing up. You are the best readers a blog could ever have, and we would like to thank you by giving each of a you a huge hug. However, that would probably take a very long time and be quite costly to travel around the world giving each reader a hug, so let’s do it like this instead. Whenever you see us at an event or a tweetup, just jump in front of us and request to be hugged. We’ll be obliged to keep our promise. Deal?

I wish we had a ton of awesome things to give away today, but we’ve been way too distracted looking into the whole server issue thing that we have been experiencing. You can be sure that we are working hard on giveaways, and I am sure that they will have every single one of you quite excited. However, now you have to embrace yourself for the awesome adventure history that we here at Bit Rebels are blessed to have been a part of. Yeah, it’s definitely been an adventure.

So where should we start? That’s the question. I could start at the very beginning where the idea formed, and how we fanatically tried to get the word out. Yes, we’ve been there as well, but if we were to go through all the levels of dedication and frustration we’ve experienced, this article would become quite large. As it is right now, it’s already a little longer than our usual articles. Maybe you have even stopped reading already because you are used to reading our bite sized blurbs.

Well, it so happens that what I am most amazed by is the fact that we set up our Facebook Fan Page on the 1st of August, 2010 (the REAL one). We rapidly starting getting new “fans,” and it was somewhat unearthly to see so many people really getting into what we were writing about. To date, just 10 months later, we already have 8,576 fans (if we may be so bold as to call them that). That’s about 29 new fans each day in average, which is pretty good! To show you the development of the Facebook page, I have included a little graph that might interest you.

What’s even more amazing is that we’ve had over 3,500,000 pageviews on Facebook since we added our new Facebook fan page. We are just amazed by those numbers, and we will continue to show our appreciation by writing better and more geeky articles to keep you guys entertained. You are of course always welcome to send us any news, ideas or tips and we’ll have a look at them and consider them for Bit Rebels news feed.

It’s easy to enter the world of megalomania when looking at these numbers, and counting the number of visitors that we’ve had since Bit Rebels was first launched would be almost impossible. We’re using two different analytics services, and they both show different results. However, to ballpark it, I would say that we’ve had between 12.5 million and 15 million unique visitors since we started Bit Rebels. That’s just an insane number of people!

How can we be better at what we’re doing? Well, we have weekly conference calls where we discuss our plans and possible changes to the site and our news feed. So far we’ve been able to increase our output quite good if I may say so myself. Some other notable statistics would be that we are, as of right now while I am writing this, the 5,741 most popular website in the US and the 13,482 most popular website in the world according to Alexa. That’s not half bad considering we just started two years ago.

• Collective Twitter Followers: 180,239
• @bitrebels: 29,050
• Comments: 26,370
• Articles: 4,276

As you can see we are really doing our best to keep you guys happy, and we will probably not stop until you guys start to abandon us, and we are forced to shut the gates to Bit Rebels. Hopefully that will not happen for a very long time. You are welcome to forward any suggestions you may have for us, and we’ll definitely take a look at them.

We are hoping to increase our reach by adding new websites to the Rebels brand, and we are working on putting some together. You might have noticed that we’re somewhat idle in adding content to the two we already have. Time is limited, and as soon as we have fixed many of the features we want to implement into Bit Rebels, we’ll slowly start bringing all of our ideas to life again. It’s fun to see that each website gets so much attention every time we add new content to it, and it keeps us inspired and energized to continue. So keep those comments, pageviews and sharings coming, and we’ll be sure not to let you guys down, ever!

See, writing an interesting article about the 2 year anniversary of Bit Rebels is really hard, and it’s easy to get carried away with data, statistics and information about how the blog has developed since we started. However, this article should be all about you guys. It is you, our readers, who are the reason we are able to deliver these numbers. Without you, there would be zeros all over the place.

So without further ado, I, Richard Darell (@Minervity) would like to thank all of you from the bottom of our hearts for all your continued support and inspiration. We hope to continue to make you laugh, cry, cringe and enjoy the geekiness that we are here to bring you. Bit Rebels is all about you, our readers. We are not the rebels, you are! Keep the rebellion alive!