Connect Flirts with 200,000 Pageviews

April was a big month for Connect, if you consider 195,000 pageviews and 11,000 unique visitors big anyway.

If you’re Facebook or Twitter, that’s a slow morning, but for our little network, which has a capped number of possible users somewhere around 80,000, it’s gangbusters.

Since January, Connect has been growing each month, and I wonder if it can sustain that rate. Not because I question the rock solid infrastructure that Rich and Anthony have built, but because I wonder if this is a wave that will eventually crest.

Twitter has been on fire lately, and Facebook continues to grow. The presence of these giants in the general consciousness has to be helping raise the water for all the little players too, including Connect.

Right?

Or are people finally getting what early adopters have been saying since 2004, that social networking has real benefits inside the firewall.

I don’t really know what’s causing the uptick. We had a huge surge in the latter part of the month, but no obvious reason why. It definitely came from abroad though, peaking in the wee hours of the night here in PDT.

Since its birth as the IdeaFactory back in June 2007, Connect has served more than 2.5 million pageviews to well over 100,000 unique visitors. Not too shabby, especially considering we only have 80,000 employees. Obviously, that doesn’t mean everyone has logged in, but I’d guess the overall login rate is about 50% of the employee population.

I know, I’m the guy who says web metrics can’t be used to judge a social network, but that’s all we’ve got right now. We’ve been too busy building features to tackle reporting, aside from Paul’s project for Defrag. It’s a shame really because I know those data would tell fascinating stories.

I’m looking forward to our redesign, which I think will really kickstart our traffic.

Or, it might put everyone up in arms a la Facebook. We’ll see this time next week.