The Metro Sports Report celebrated another milestone in late August when we passed 1.5 million pageviews for the website.

Or as I like to see the number written, we passed 1,500,000 pageviews. All those zeroes make it seem more impressive, don't you think?

We stood at 1,531,645 pageviews when the clock struck Sept. 1. We're averaging nearly 100,000 pageviews per month now, so at that pace we should reach 2 million pageviews in January.

The timing would be special if we hit 2 million in early January. We launched our little project on Jan. 3, 2011, so it would be great fun if we hit 2 million on Jan. 3, 2013.

Pageviews are nice, especially round numbers, but our advertisers like to know a different number. They want to know how many "unique visitors" we've had, because they like to know how many different people are coming to the website and seeing their ads.

As of Aug. 31, the number of unique visitors had reached 171,274 since we launched the MSR. That's an interesting figure, because it's roughly the total population of Cedar Rapids, Marion and our surrounding towns.

We serve the eight high schools in Cedar Rapids and Marion -- Jefferson, Kennedy, Washington, Prairie, Xavier, Linn-Mar, Marion and Cedar Valley Christian -- so in effect we've had one "unique visitor" for every man, woman and child in our market.

That's not totally accurate, of course, because we've had visitors from all 50 states and from 58 different countries, according to Carl Whiting, our Google analytics guru and marketing director.

Carl was going through the list of countries Sunday night, but I had to finish this story by midnight so I stopped him after Ethiopia, Malaysia, the Netherland Antilles, Uganda, Kenya, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Russia, Chile and a few others. There might be some "territories" in there instead of actual countries, but we'll let that slide for now.

There's only one word that can accurately describe the success we've had with the Metro Sports Report, at least from my point of view, and that word is phenomenal. We had no idea what to expect when we launched the MSR, but needless to say we did not expect 1.5 million pageviews in 20 months.

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you. And we're not done yet. Far from it.

We have a new advertising media kit now for anyone who's interested in spending a few bucks with us. Carol Montag, an accomplished graphic design artist and one of our advertising sales representatives, put the media kit together and it's a beauty.

Give me a call or send me an e-mail and I'll ship you one. It's a prize-winner, assembled with great detail and eye-catching graphics. My contact information is listed on the home page, up at the top right where everyone can see it.

There's a lot of other new stuff going on with the company. Maybe you caught our Japan-Metro All-Star Classic baseball game that we held at Kennedy High School on August 14th. That was a terrific night and a lot of fun for everyone, including our new friends from Japan who left with many happy memories and pictures of themselves with the Kennedy girls volleyball team.

We interrupted the volleyball team's practice while giving the Japanese team a tour of the school and the girls were happy to pose with the guys, even though nobody understood a word either team was saying. Smiles were the universal language that day.

We'd like to host another Japanese team when they visit Iowa in 2014 as part of a sister-state exchange program between Yamanashi and Iowa, and we're looking for someone for the Metro all-stars to play next summer if somebody has an idea. Hint: Think big. Anybody have any contacts in Mexico, Puerto Rico or Canada?

We're working on another special event for December of 2013, but it's too early to make any major announcements about that. Soon, hopefully.

There's other new stuff going on. We have not maximized the use of Facebook and Twitter since we launched the company, but we're ready to dive fully into that world thanks to two talented University of Iowa students who are working with us as interns this fall. Their names are Emily Oyster and Julian Gonzalez and we're lucky to have them.

We've also added new freelance photographers in Iowa City, Dubuque and Waterloo so we can print more pictures from those towns when our Metro teams hit the road. We're very fortunate to have Becki Eyman in Iowa City, Donna Schmitt in Dubuque and Justin Scott in Waterloo/Cedar Falls to enhance our efforts. They join Margaret O'Banion, Ken Gilchrist, Joe Bishop and Justin Tedford in our lineup of photographers.

Many of our readers have taken advantage of the Metro Sports Report Photo Gallery, where we offer pictures for sale at very reasonable prices. We sold more than 100 pictures in August, and that was a relatively slow month without a lot of events. We launched the Photo Gallery on Sept. 8, 2011 and we'll have a total count for Year 1 by next week.

We're seriously exploring the idea of expanding the website to include more teams and more readers, but that's a story for another day.

Soon, hopefully.

In closing, we'd just like to thank all of our readers for giving us a chance and coming back for more. And we'd especially like to thank all the businesses and companies that have supported us with their advertising dollars, because we couldn't do this without them.

As we say at the end of our daily radio segment on KGYM, thanks for listening and thanks for reading the Metro Sports Report dot com.