What 17 years of website traffic tell me about conference design : Conferences That Work

I’ve 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.

But what does that actually mean?

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.

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

Here’s the data.

There are four very different stories in those numbers.

2009–2013: Slowly becoming findable

When I created Conference That Work’s website, there were roughly a million websites on the internet.

Mine was, as far as I knew, the only website devoted specifically to conference design.

That sounds like an enormous competitive advantage. It wasn’t, because almost nobody was searching for conference design.

Worse, when someone did search for the phrase “conference design,” 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.

The problem wasn’t competition. It was that almost nobody had yet recognized that designing a conference was itself a thing worth doing deliberately.

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.

I kept doing it.

The traffic rose slowly:

• October 2009: 3,589 pageviews
• December 2009: 12,531
• December 2010: 51,189
• December 2011: 95,404
• December 2012: 297,134

That looks almost exponential when plotted on a graph, but there was no single breakthrough behind it.

Google and people gradually discovered the site. And, as I accumulated hundreds of articles on conference design, Google had more and more reasons to send people to it.

By 2012, the site was receiving around 200,000 pageviews a month. That was still tiny by the standards of the mass web, but it was a remarkable change from where I had started.

More importantly, the traffic was increasingly coming from the core audience I cared about.

2013–2015: The accidental million-pageview post

Then something happened that had little to do with conference design.

I occasionally wrote about subjects that had nothing to do with meetings.

One of those posts explained how to mass-delete emails on Apple devices. At the time, doing this wasn’t particularly easy, and my explanation apparently solved a problem many people had.

Google loved it, and for several years, that single article generated more than a million pageviews a year.

It wasn’t alone. A handful of other non-conference-design articles also attracted large numbers of visitors.

You can see the effect very clearly in the numbers. Monthly traffic rose from about 200,000 pageviews in 2013 to:

• 351,117 in April 2014
• 703,120 in August 2014
• 960,984 in September 2014
• 967,317 in January 2015

At the peak, the site was approaching a million pageviews every month.

It would have been tempting to conclude that I had suddenly become a major force in the conference industry.

But I hadn’t; rather, I had become a good source of answers to some unrelated questions.

This is one of the oddities of running a website: the traffic graph doesn’t necessarily tell you what people value most about what you do. It tells you what people are looking for and what search engines think will answer their questions.

2015–2022: The viral traffic disappears

Eventually, the internet changed. Other people discovered that writing highly targeted articles answering popular questions could generate enormous search traffic.

For example, someone made a well-produced video explaining the same Apple email-deletion technique I had described.

Google eventually preferred the video to my article, and my million-pageview-a-year windfall disappeared.

The site’s traffic declined accordingly. From a monthly peak of 967,317 pageviews in January 2015, traffic fell to 578,839 in February 2016 and then generally settled into the 600,000–700,000 range.

Then it kept falling.

By 2018, monthly traffic was generally between 450,000 and 500,000.

By 2019, it was closer to 400,000.

From 2020 through 2022, it settled into an even lower range, generally between about 350,000 and 450,000 pageviews a month.

This decline can look rather depressing if you look only at the graph.

But there’s a more interesting way to interpret it.

The anomalous traffic was disappearing. What remained was increasingly the traffic generated by what I had actually spent all those years writing about: conference design, facilitation, connection, participation, and related subjects.

In other words, the website was becoming less dependent on accidental virality and more dependent on its core purpose.

2020: COVID scrambles the picture

Then COVID arrived.

The conference industry effectively stopped, which makes interpreting the traffic data from 2020 onward more complicated.

There was an obvious reason to expect interest in conference design to fall: there were suddenly far fewer conferences being held.

But there was also an enormous new need for information about online meetings, virtual conferences, facilitation, participation, and what happened when you moved human gatherings onto screens.

I wrote about these topics, and my traffic actually rose from 353,730 pageviews in February 2020 to 430,255 in March and 436,451 in April.

It then settled back toward the levels of the preceding years.

The pandemic therefore produced a peculiar mixture of effects. It destroyed the business model and physical reality that much of my work had been built around, while simultaneously creating enormous interest in questions about how people could meet differently.

By 2021 and 2022, monthly traffic was mostly in the 350,000–430,000 range.

The site’s long decline had essentially bottomed out.

2023–2024: The core audience starts growing again

Something changed after 2022.

In 2023, monthly pageviews climbed back above 400,000 and then accelerated substantially during the second half of the year.

August 2023 reached 615,463 pageviews.

By the end of the year, monthly traffic was around 570,000.

The growth continued through 2024. Monthly pageviews reached 627,140 in June, 649,829 in September, and 657,725 in October.

The annual average went from about 374,000 pageviews in 2022 to about 494,000 in 2023 and 584,000 in 2024.

That is a very different kind of growth from what happened in 2014–15.

I no longer had the enormous accidental traffic generated by a handful of unrelated articles.

The site was attracting more visitors, perhaps because the meeting industry was starting to recover from the effects of COVID, and more people were finding—and presumably finding useful—my posts on conference design and facilitation.

I found this increase in traffic most satisfying!

2025: Something much bigger happens

Then came 2025.

The numbers changed dramatically:

• January: 826,838.
• March: 841,162.
• April: 1,032,334.
• May: 1,241,636.
• August: 1,281,864.
• September: 1,518,744.

For the year as a whole, the site averaged almost 1.1 million pageviews a month.

That was a new high.

It is tempting to compare this directly with the million-pageview months of 2014–15, but the comparison isn’t right.

The earlier peak was dominated by a few articles on subjects unrelated to conference design.

The 2025 traffic is much more representative of the website as it exists today.

There is another complication, however.

Enter the bots

The web I built my site for in 2009 was a web of people and search engines.

The web of 2026 contains another enormous population: machines that read websites.

Large language models require enormous quantities of text. Companies developing them have built crawlers that systematically retrieve material from websites, just as traditional search engines crawl websites to build search indexes.

This wasn’t entirely new in 2025, but its scale and importance became increasingly obvious during 2024 and 2025.

Cloudflare’s measurements provide a useful picture of what was happening across the web. It reported that AI and search crawler traffic increased 18% from May 2024 to May 2025, peaking in April 2025 with a 32% increase compared to May 2024. By 2025, Cloudflare found that AI bots accounted for an average of 4.2% of HTML requests across its network.

Because AI crawlers continue to systematically access the web, the distinction between “traffic” and “people visiting my website” has become simultaneously more important and harder to disentangle.

No longer does a pageview recorded by a web server necessarily represent a person sitting at a computer reading a page. Some of those requests now come from machines reading the site for search, AI training, AI search, or other purposes.

That matters when looking at a 17-year traffic graph.

I don’t have sufficiently granular historical bot data to say how much of any particular rise in my site’s pageviews was caused by AI crawlers. I therefore wouldn’t claim that the 2025 increase was caused by AI.

But AI crawling is now an important part of the web’s traffic ecology, and it needs to be taken into account when interpreting the numbers.

2025–2026: controlling who gets to read the site

Sometime in September 2025, I put the entire site behind Cloudflare and enabled its options for restricting AI crawler traffic.

That makes the recent numbers even more interesting.

Cloudflare had already introduced a one-click option for customers to block AI scrapers in July 2024. By 2025, it was developing increasingly sophisticated ways to distinguish among different kinds of AI crawling and to give site owners control over them.

In other words, the meaning of “pageview” is changing at exactly the time that my site’s traffic has reached levels I haven’t seen since the great accidental traffic explosion of 2014–15.

And yet, after putting the site behind Cloudflare and restricting AI crawlers, my monthly pageviews have remained remarkably high:

• January 2026: 1,044,990
• March: 1,081,728
• May: 1,162,810
• July: 1,096,994
• August: 1,116,458

So far, 2026 is averaging about 1.07 million pageviews a month.

That’s substantially above the 2024 average of about 584,000.

The precise reasons for the increase deserve further investigation. Search-engine changes, the accumulation of 17 years of content, increased interest in conference design, individual articles performing unusually well, changes in Google’s search algorithms, and machine traffic may all contribute.

But the broad historical pattern is clear.

What the graph really shows

I think there are five distinct eras hidden in this one line on a graph.

2009–2013: Discovery.

I created a body of work on a subject that scarcely existed in the web’s vocabulary. Over several years, Google and human readers gradually found it.

2014–2015: Accidental virality.

A few articles about unrelated technical problems brought enormous amounts of traffic. The website became much bigger than its core subject justified.

2016–2022: Normalization.

The viral articles lost their dominance. What remained was primarily the site’s conference-design and facilitation content. Traffic declined, but the audience became more closely aligned with what I actually write about.

2023–2024: Renewed growth.

The site’s core traffic began to increase again after bottoming out around 2021–22.

2025–2026: A new scale—and a new kind of web.

Traffic more than doubled compared with the 2022 low point and reached levels comparable to the old viral era. But the web itself has changed. Some requests now come from machines rather than people, and AI has become a significant consumer of publicly available web content.

There is a final irony here.

When I started the website, the problem was that no one was searching for information on conference design.

Seventeen years later, there is clearly an audience for it.

I still don’t know exactly how many of the people visiting the site are interested in the ideas I’ve spent decades developing.

But I do know that the site has survived several very different versions of the web: the early Google web, the blogging era, the viral-content era, the mobile web, the COVID disruption, and now the AI era.

And the traffic graph is, in its own peculiar way, a history of all of them.