I came across an old blog post that showed that Autocade took four years to get 2,000,000 page views: not bad for an encyclopædia that receives very little promotion. That was in March 2012. It has since crossed 4,000,000, which meant the second 2,000,000 took 21 months to achieve (in December 2013). If the growth rate continues, then we’ll get to 5,000,000 some time in 2014.
I estimate that the first 2,000,000 were achieved on 1,800 model entries. There are just over 2,400 today, which means each page is attracting more visits. The 2,400th entry was the Renault Scénic III.
There are still a lot of holes, but not as many as when we were on 1,000 and got the first bit of press attention. I thank all the spammers and spambots: without you, I would never have locked down the wiki and restricted it to a select few specialists (not that that many people popped by wanting to add to Autocade in the early days). Peter Jobes’, Keith Adams’ and Nigel Dunn’s contributions both to the technology and the content have helped make it a very usable site.
I’m really happy people are finding Autocade such a useful resource. It was always intended to be global and geographically neutral. I’m running into more and more people who visit it but had no idea I founded the website, and more recently, some even suggested that a printed authoritative car guide could be built around it (especially as most car buffs can poke holes in Auto Katalog and similar annuals). It takes an enthusiast to build a site for other enthusiasts, which is, once again, why Wikipedia fails so badly on the motoring stuff. Generalists will never have the same passion, or, for that matter, the same commitment to accuracy.