Franky Benítez

A year hasn’t even gone by since LatinoRebels.com launched on May 5, 2011 and the merry and mischievous band of social media influentials who formed together to create a site that spoke to their world through comedy, commentary, analysis, activism, politics, social media, music, and independent journalism has become one of the country’s (and now the world’s) top independent sites for US Latino content, news, issues, and just general mayhem. In just 10 months, some very cool and very amazing things have happened. Here are just a few, and yes, we will have more to share on May 5, 2012, when LatinoRebels.com turns 1:

• As of tonight March 26, 2012, according to our Google Analytics, LatinoRebels.com has gotten over 176,000 unique vistors, with over 220,000 visits and over 317,000 pageviews. We still have about six weeks until we complete our first year online, and we feel that we are on target to complete over 250,000 uniques and 400,000 page views in our first year of existence.
• As of March 20, 2012, we have already exceeded our total 2011 traffic. In other words, all the traffic we got from May, 2011 until December 2011 (eight months), we exceeded that number in less than three months in 2012. We have experienced about a 240% increase in our traffic in the last two months, and this week alone (March 19-March 26) we have gotten over 15,000 unique visitors and over 25,099 pageviews. In addition, with just five days left in March, we are on target to achieving 100,000 pageviews and over 50,000 unique visitors. Spread over a year, that would come out to 1.2 million pageviews and 600,000 unique visitors. Those figures were just pipe dreams, now we are in the running to achieve that goal.
• Our current Alexa ranking for March 26, 2012 is this:

• Compete.com is another site we use, besides our own Google Analytics and WordPress stats and this is what they list the page at as of February, 2012. According to Compete.com, we say a 12.16% increase in unique visitors from January 2012 to February 2012 and we are currently ranked 181,304 in the world, having moved up another 29,254 slots up the rankings in just one month.

• According to Quantcast, which we activated for our site on March 9, 2012 (so we don’t have a full month’s worth of data), these are our current rankings and daily traffic for last week as of tonight:

• In the meantime, our Facebook page is 75 people from hitting the 13,000 mark and tonight our engagement rate of 33.6%, meaning that 1/3 of our all Facebook community members have engaged us or have shared our content with their Facebook friends today.

To all who have been there with us from the very beginning, thank you. This amazing growth took some luck but it also shows that if you write good content, stay true to yourself and independent, use social media and authentic networking and relationship-building to complement your page’s goal, and curate content that you feel matters to your community, you will attract interest. We will continue to be who we are, even if we just had one reader (or even if we had no readers). However, we are not going to lie about this: this feels pretty good. The Rebeldes thank you all!

Independent journalism and content creation lives. We are proud to be Rebeldes.