Three years ago, Pride of Detroit launched right before the 2006 NFL Draft.  It has been a wild ride for Lions fans since then, and time certainly has flown by.  POD is already celebrating its three-year birthday, which is beyond hard to believe.  It seems like the site just turned two, but then again, the past year has seemed like one big blur to me.  Part of that is probably because of just how quickly so many great things happened to POD in the last 12 months.

For starters, the change in the amount of interaction on the site has been amazing in just these last few months.  It was already starting to get better after the season, but it has really taken off since February.  Proof of that is in this amazing statistic: The total amount of new comments just on front-page posts this weekend was over 6,000.  6,000!  If you add in all of the new FanPosts and comments on them, I'm willing to bet that number was close to or even over 7,000.

Aside from the change in interaction, the amount of traffic POD has seen in the last couple of months has been truly unbelievable to me.  Like the interaction, it was starting to pick up after the season, and then once free agency hit it took off.  Single-day records were broken multiple times, the monthly record has been shattered again, and the traffic levels from this past week are truly humbling to me.  During the draft, there were almost 67,000 page views.  That number actually looks small compared to the day after the new logo/uniforms were revealed, though.  Last Tuesday, POD set a single-day record that will probably not be broken for some time: over 85,000 page views.  For draft week, there were over 230,000 page views, helping make April POD's biggest month ever with nearly 400,000 page views.  Considering in April 2008 the site only got around 27,000 page views for the entire month, it's hard to believe how far POD has come in only a year.

Anyways, I just want to give a big thanks to everyone out there for making Pride of Detroit the great community that it has become.  Without you this obviously wouldn't be possible, so thanks and here's to more success -- both for the site and the team -- in the rest of 2009 and early 2010.