{"id":7058623,"date":"2026-09-10T16:06:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T16:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/what-17-years-of-website-traffic-tell-me-about-conference-design-conferences-that-work\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T16:06:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T16:06:01","slug":"what-17-years-of-website-traffic-tell-me-about-conference-design-conferences-that-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7058623","title":{"rendered":"What 17 years of website traffic tell me about conference design : Conferences That Work"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n
\"conference\"conference
A line graph of monthly pageviews for the Conferences That Work website from October 2009 through August 2026. The graph tells a complicated 17-year story: an initial rise as the site was discovered, a dramatic 2014\u201315 spike driven in part by unrelated viral content, a long decline, and renewed growth to more than 1 million pageviews per month in 2025\u201326.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve been publishing on conference design and facilitation for almost 17 years. During that time, the monthly pageviews on my website have gone from a few thousand to more than a million.<\/p>\n

But what does that actually mean?<\/p>\n

Pageviews are an extraordinarily crude measure of success. My traffic has been driven at different times by people discovering conference design, Google search, some wildly successful articles on unrelated subjects, COVID, and increasingly by machines crawling the web.<\/p>\n

So I decided to look more carefully at the numbers and try to disentangle what\u2019s actually happened and what it says about the success of the site\u2019s original purpose: helping people understand and practice better participant-driven and participation-rich conference design.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Period<\/th>\nTypical monthly pageviews<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Late 2009<\/td>\n8,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2010<\/td>\n34,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2011<\/td>\n89,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2012<\/td>\n190,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2013<\/td>\n209,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2014<\/td>\n585,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2015<\/td>\n809,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2016<\/td>\n644,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2017<\/td>\n647,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2018<\/td>\n496,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2019<\/td>\n408,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2020<\/td>\n403,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2021<\/td>\n397,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2022<\/td>\n374,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2023<\/td>\n494,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2024<\/td>\n584,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2025<\/td>\n1,096,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2026, through August<\/td>\n1,068,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

There are four very different stories in those numbers.<\/p>\n

2009\u20132013: Slowly becoming findable<\/h2>\n
\"conference\"conference
17 years of pageviews, five different stories. The challenge is figuring out how much of the graph represents people discovering conference design, and how much represents everything else.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I created Conference That Work\u2019s website, there were roughly a million websites on the internet.<\/p>\n

Mine was, as far as I knew, the only website devoted specifically to conference design.<\/p>\n

That sounds like an enormous competitive advantage. It wasn\u2019t, because almost nobody was searching for conference design.<\/p>\n

Worse, when someone did search for the phrase \u201cconference design,\u201d Google returned a perfectly reasonable set of links that had nothing to do with what I meant. The search results were full of conferences about design: industrial design, fashion design, advertising design, and so forth.<\/p>\n

The problem wasn\u2019t competition. It was that almost nobody had yet recognized that designing a conference was itself a thing worth doing deliberately.<\/p>\n

I started developing participant-driven, participation-rich conference designs in 1992. Starting in November 2009, I began writing a weekly blog post about conference design and facilitation.<\/p>\n

I kept doing it.<\/p>\n

The traffic rose slowly:<\/p>\n