T-Squared: The Two-Year Stats

Yep, today's the second anniversary of our launch — a big deal for a whole bunch of reasons (can't believe we got here, look how much we've accomplished, maybe this thing will work after all). No fancy or elaborate celebration other than our fall membership drive and a little fun on our homepage, but still a milestone worth marking.

For the gazillionth time let me say that we're enormously grateful to all of you for your support, which comes in many forms. You consume the journalism we produce. You give us pretty terrific feedback. You send us a few bucks. You pore over our data. You show up at our events. Most important, you believe in our mission. You believe that a smarter Texas is possible, and therefore that a better Texas is possible. We can only hope.

On this momentous occasion we are also enormously proud, of ourselves and each other. We're honoring both the premise and the promise of the Tribune, every day, without fail.

You may be wondering — I was — about the analytics after two years. Here's what I can tell you about our performance in a couple of areas worthy of measurement.

Total page views: 58,462,910 (Most viewed data app since launch: Government employee salaries. Most viewed story: "Under scrutiny, Perry walks back HPV decision," by Jay Root)

Total visits: 12,108,876 (Visits by city: Austin 31.73%, Houston 14.72%, Dallas 8.29%, San Antonio 5.66%. Out-of-state visits: 30.1%. Data apps visits as a percentage of the total: 33.91%)

Total unique visitors: 6,408,039 (Highest number of uniques on a single day: 143,689 on 8/15/11 — the Monday after Rick Perry announced for president.)

Average pages viewed per visit: 4.83

On the funding side — well, there's lots of good news to report about the robustness of the nonprofit model. I'll simply say that we're at roughly $10.3 million pledged to date, which is an awful lot of money to raise in the worst economy since the Depression. (View our donors and members here. View our corporate sponsors here.) But we're not done — not by a long shot. I've often compared the effort expended to cover our costs to Indiana Jones outrunning the boulder: Can't take your eyes off the ground in front of you for a second or you'll get run over. Well, we won't.

Now it's back to work. We have a crazy, complex, intensely interesting presidential campaign to cover, along with a U.S. Senate race and 181 legislative elections and huge public policy challenges of great importance to every Texan.

Here's to the next two years...