Average-Dudes is One Year Old!

That’s right, folks. Our first post hit the web one year ago today. Since we launched, we’ve had 130,962 visits and 209,636 pageviews. Not too bad for a few non-writers who have done relatively little to promote our site.

We’ve had our share of highs and lows but we’re still here. Let’s take a moment to reflect on the past year….(that rhymed)

In November of 2007, I was lucky enough to attend PostieCon in Las Vegas, a blogging conference hosted by IZEA. I worked for them at the time shooting footage for their web-documentary show called RockStartup. During the conference, a blogger named David Ponce took the stage and talked about how he got into blogging. He basically looked at successful writers that he admired and decided that he could easily do the same thing. He launched OhGizmo.com, plugged away for a while and it took off. Now he has writers working for him and he (apparently) lives a pretty comfortable life.

Hearing that story made me say the exact same thing: I could do that. When I got home I told Dyna all about it and we agreed that we should give it a shot. Literally a week later, Average-Dudes was born.

The original format of the site was meant to provide reviews of products and services from the perspective of an average consumer. I dreamed about companies sending us products so that we could review them, going on trips, meeting lots of people, etc. To an extent, we’ve realized that dream. We’ve gotten some pretty cool products from companies like P&P Imports and Shipyard Brewery, but it has never quite turned into what I thought it would. Yet.

As we wrote new posts and found tools to help us gain exposure, we saw a trend emerging. The posts that got the most hits had nothing to do with products. To date, the single post that has had the most views is a re-posting of a Men’s Health article called “50 Things Men Wish You Knew.” I don’t know if people thought that we compiled the list or what, but the amount of traffic that post has seen is staggering. Second to that is Steve’s article, “Four Drinking Games Every Average Dude Should Know.” That thing hit StumbleUpon (a pretty cool tool) and exploded. The product reviews that we were pumping out basically got passed over so we paid less attention to reviews and more attention to random pop-culture topics.

We’re just kind of winging it at this point so I figured it might be appropriate to ask you guys what you think. With one year under our belt, how are we doing? What do you want to see more or less of? Should we add any features? Leave us some feedback and maybe some birthday wishes in the comments. And thanks again for checking us out. Hopefully this is just the beginning.

Also, I have to thank Dyna for keeping this thing going both in a web development sense and for posting stuff when I’m slacking. And thanks to Steve for writing some of the best posts on here. Get back to work!