Facts about GFF

The Global FlyFisher is a web site for fly fishers and fly tyers - and to some extend for outdoors people in general. The site has a very long history, dating back to the beginning of the Internet era in 1994.

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The Global FlyFisher is a non-commercial web site for fly fishers and fly tyers - and to some extend for outdoors people in general. The site has a very long history, dating back to the beginning of the Internet era in 1994, and our oldest articles are from that period.

The site is run by me: Martin Joergensen, a Danish fly angler, aided by three partners, Bob Petti and Steve Schweitzer from the US and Kasper Mühlbach from Denmark as well as a large group of outside contributors.
The Global FlyFisher is a privately run web site, which has no ads or sponsors and no sources of income, but is run as a work of love at our own expenses. We all have full time jobs, and both our own material and that from outside contributors is done as unpaid work.

We serve internationally flavored fly fishing related content to the whole world. The site contains more than 2,000 articles and more than 30,000 pictures. Our contributors come from all over the globe - pros and amateurs, seasoned writers and beginners.
We feature all things fly fishing and fly tying related like pattern recipes, fishing and gear advice, book and DVD reviews, videos and much more.

We serve more than two and a half a million pages a month

We are a high traffic web site (at least for a fly-fishing site):

  • We have had up towards 10,000 unique visitors on a good day
  • We have up towards 150,000 visits a month
  • We serve up towards half a million pages a month
  • A typical article is seen several hundred times a day when it's published
  • Our most viewed articles have been seen 20-50,000 times and some even more

We're always on the lookout for new ideas, new content and new contributors, so feel free to contact us if you have something fly fishing related on your heart. We're also interested in working with authors, film makers, artists and other people who produce relevant material.

Some graphs for the last couple of years for those who want numbers. The numbers are taken directly from our server stats. Latest months are at the top. The reason for the drop in traffic in the spring months is simply the start of the fishing season in the northern hemisphere. As soon as people can get out to fish, they surf less! And the disastrous July 2011 was due to another period with the server blues. We had severe technical problems, had to move to a new server, reprogram our system and had long periods of downtime.
The reason for the difference in the two measurements is that the server stats contain all physical activity on the server while the Google Analytics stats only count the pages which contain the script that's needed by Google, which is far from all our pages. The real traffic numbers are closer to the server stats than to Google's numbers.

Please notice that we stopped harvesting these numbers in August/September 2015 where the site was converted to a new system and server, which doesn't support the same statistics tools.



Visits per month

From our Hostgator server statistics (Webalizer) and Google Analytics

Toggle full graph
Webalizer Oct 2015 363,563
Google Oct 2015 363,563
Webalizer Sep 2015 342,555
Google Sep 2015 342,555
Webalizer Aug 2015 322,983
Google Aug 2015 322,983
Webalizer Jul 2015 320,221
Google Jul 2015 320,221
Webalizer Jun 2015 331,369
Google Jun 2015 331,369
Webalizer May 2015 351,641
Google May 2015 351,641



Average unique visits per day

From our Hostgator server statistics (Webalizer) and Google Analytics

Toggle full graph
Webalizer Oct 2015 11,728
Google Oct 2015 11,728
Webalizer Sep 2015 11,419
Google Sep 2015 11,419
Webalizer Aug 2015 10,419
Google Aug 2015 10,419
Webalizer Jul 2015 10,330
Google Jul 2015 10,330
Webalizer Jun 2015 11,046
Google Jun 2015 11,046
Webalizer May 2015 11,343
Google May 2015 11,343



Pages served per month

From our Hostgator server statistics (Webalizer) and Google Analytics

Toggle full graph
Webalizer Oct 2015 1,952,714
Google Oct 2015 1,952,714
Webalizer Sep 2015 1,865,193
Google Sep 2015 1,865,193
Webalizer Aug 2015 1,886,437
Google Aug 2015 1,886,437
Webalizer Jul 2015 1,994,397
Google Jul 2015 1,994,397
Webalizer Jun 2015 1,947,359
Google Jun 2015 1,947,359
Webalizer May 2015 2,059,272
Google May 2015 2,059,272



Pages served per day

From our Hostgator server statistics (Webalizer) and Google Analytics

Toggle full graph
Webalizer Oct 2015 62,991
Google Oct 2015 62,991
Webalizer Sep 2015 62,173
Google Sep 2015 62,173
Webalizer Aug 2015 60,853
Google Aug 2015 60,853
Webalizer Jul 2015 64,335
Google Jul 2015 64,335
Webalizer Jun 2015 64,912
Google Jun 2015 64,912
Webalizer May 2015 66,428
Google May 2015 66,428
Please notice that this article is some years old, and that things have changed.
Read The decline of GFF for more details.

And while we're looking at numbers (2013/2014):
We are in stable growth right now (January 2014), and December 2013 was our busiest month ever with close to 350,000 visits and almost 2.7 million pages served.
The prediction below for 2013 held up - and then some. The real number of pages served was almost 19 millions.
Not bad at all...

And while we're looking at numbers (2012/2013):
If we try to predict some 2012-numbers based on the latest 6-12 months, the coming year will be a year with about 3 million individual viewing sessions covering about 17 million pages... pretty hefty.
February 2012 was our best month ever, and based on that alone the numbers will be more like 3.5 million sessions covering 23 million pages. Amazing!

We will do our best to serve the best possible content to all these people.

More links;

Submitted by Jay on

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I like to just bounce all over this site. I link your stuff over to some friends for FYI's. Someday I hope to around to sending you something.

Submitted by 1737246340 on

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Thank you for all the hard work all those years.

Best regards ,
Tom Biesot.

Submitted by Santi R. on

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Congratulations guys! Those numbers shows how good you have been doing it.

Thanks a lot and keep going!

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Since you got this far …


The GFF money box

… I have a small favor to ask.

Long story short

Support the Global FlyFisher through several different channels, including PayPal.

Long story longer

The Global FlyFisher has been online since the mid-90's and has been free to access for everybody since day one – and will stay free for as long as I run it.
But that doesn't mean that it's free to run.
It costs money to drive a large site like this.
See more details about what you can do to help in this blog post.