As a Way of Saying Thank You: My Million Reader Giveaway!

I’m putting together a giveaway of items,, both big and small, that I’d like my readers to have as a personal way of saying THANK YOU this holiday season.

I don’t really track my blog traffic all that closely. I know that of the hundreds of thousands of visits this blog receives each month, each person comes an average of about four times. But that’s as far as my tracking of these things goes.

I remember way back, after I had been blogging for a year, that my traffic was about 500 visits per day. That was 10 1/2 years ago. Back then I did have an email list of a little more than 1000 people who had signed up to get my posts each day. That sort of encouragement made me feel like what I was doing here was valuable, as was meeting people at frequent flyer get-togethers and having folks tell me that they read the site every day. I appreciate that. I really do love my readers, and I love answering all of the questions that I get every day. I do my best to answer all of the emails that come in.

Randy Petersen emailed me on Friday to let me know that I was rounding towards one million absolute unique visitors over the course of the year. I had no idea.

I mean, I know that each day through a variety of different means — traffic to the blog, email lists, feed subscriptions — that over 30,000 people a day were reading this, I put that number down at the bottom of my posts. In fact now the number is probably more like 40,000. But I always assumed those were the same people. I had no idea that it was more like a million different people checking in here. I love that.

If I had realized earlier I would have reached out to my favorite travel programs and asked them to join me in celebrating by offering points and status. But I didn’t have the lead time for that. Perhaps some time with a future giveaway.

Instead I’m going to clean out my own personal stash, and commit to giving away a minimum of twenty different items to readers though probably more. I’ll do it all in a single giveaway post (or if it becomes too cumbersome, perhaps in two giveaway posts), I won’t drag this out over the course of the whole month. But I do want to personally say thank you — by sharing my miles, by sharing elite status, gift cards, and other items that I can offer you. Because I really do appreciate interacting with you here each and every day.

Coming soon…


About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Great to hear, as one of the recent RSS Feeders, you’ve quickly gained the way to my daily routine. Thanks for running such a direct and easy to read blog.

  2. Not to burst your bubble, but one person checking on several different devices, like an iPad, laptop, or computer will each reister as unique. So you can divide that “million” in half, at least.

  3. @America! I really know very little about these things, though of course multiple people reading from the same computer would only register as one. I don’t spend a lot of time on my traffic, it seemed like a good reason and as the holidays approach to say thank you and put behind it some miles and some status. That’s all.

  4. What a wonderful thing to do! Thank you. You have helped us frequent fliers with so much information and advice.

  5. Wow, thanks for being generous! I am one of those folks who stops to tie my shoelaces when leaving a plane to snag anything left in business class. Those amenity kit bags are great for everything I do. I could use a million of them, usually score nada!!

  6. I’m sure lots of these readers are also no us resident like myself, pleaseeee make it worlwide! pliz pliz pliz, thank you!

  7. Your traffic is what it is because you deliver great, quality content. You’re the only blogger that combines uniqueness and breadth of content, and still has the respect of both newbies and advanced folks. Keep up the great work!

  8. congrats! it’s not easy to get that many unique readers! maintaining and writing for blogs are not as easy as it looks! great job

  9. @America! please review the “Debbie Downer” skits on SNL and adjust your persona accordingly. Kthxbye

  10. Congratulations Gary! As others have said, it is your content that generates your views and your content is superb.

  11. heartfelt congratulations Gary, you deserve it. i’ve been reading your blog for a few years now and enjoy it today as much as, or even more than ever. keep up the great work (and don’t forget your old pals when you become rich and famous.) 😉

  12. Thanks to you, and all other mile bloggers, for sharing this information and allowing me take my family places!

  13. Congratulations, Gary — but no surprise. Your numbers would be going the other way if you weren’t offering real, dependable, usable value.
    It’s also very evident that you love what you do, and that makes reading your material more enjoyable.
    Your plan is a very generous (albeit wholly unnecessary) end-of-year/holiday season gesture. Frosting on the cake, if you will, because it’s your info that’s the invaluable gift to all your readers. We look forward to much more of that in 2014 and beyond.

  14. Congrats on reaching One Millions viewers, that’s very impressive! It also explains why I never win any of the giveaways :). I always look forward to reading your blog, you taught me how to be points savvy.

  15. @Gary – I would love to read your blog on a daily basis and add to the viewship, but my internet just got disconnected. I just got laid off and then my cat got ran over by a drunk driver. If I won anything it would be great, since I could sure use a pick me up since the divorce. My husband cheated on me and left me for his secretary. I mean its only fair that he left b/c I’m emotionally detached due to the chemo I have to do twice a week. *sigh*

  16. Based on all of the great advice I drawn from you over the years, shouldn’t we be sending you a million miles?

  17. Well done, Gary! Impressive stats. And I wonder if that even includes people who read via feedly and other such outlets.

  18. And I’m at least four distinct devices — but nonetheless the “read” is compelling enough to cause me to read you at work, at home, on a tablet and on the smartphone!

    Congrats!

  19. My #1 travel blog out of the 50 or so I read every day. Just no one better at analysis and truly thinking through the travel game. Gary deserves every accolade he gets.

  20. Congratulations on reaching the 1M mark. And thank you for the good job that you do every day. You’ve added to our lives immensely with your travel advice.

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