Do consumers even visit ActiveRain?

I just stumbled upon the comment above that was a part of a post where people were debating the returns on various online real estate websites.  I have heard the sentiments of the comment above numerous times since founding ActiveRain. Because of the rich professional-to-professional networking that happens everyday on ActiveRain some people dismiss the great consumer reach of the site.  This is likely our fault as we tend not to toot our own horn regarding our accomplishments. As a result we have done a poor job educating the industry as to the power inherent in ActiveRain to connect real estate professionals with consumers.

I track our traffic numbers on a daily basis. It's a borderline obsession for me. When you've built websites your whole adult life, this tends to happen. For example, I know that yesterday was our second highest number of visitors ever to the site. 88% of our visitors on a monthly basis come from search engines or referral from other sites. These are potential clients doing search queries that are leading them to your posts.

But the stat that jumps out at me that lets me know ActiveRain is MUCH MORE than 'primarily a peer-to-peer platform' is this: the number of members on our site is quite a bit less than 10% of our unique visitors per month. That means there are over 9 consumers hitting the site for every one member.........and when you factor in how many of our members are actually contributing content, that number gets even higher.

As I was getting ready to write this post, I did some additional research and found the graph below that compares ActiveRain's traffic with other "big boys" of our industry: ColdwellBanker.com, REMAX.com, Century21.com, and KW.com.  It is exciting for me to note that we started off one year ago in 5th place (out of 5) in this group and now we are ranking in 2nd place with almost a 200% yearly growth rate.