This Day in Baylor History: Our Daily Bears Turns 2!

It's hard to believe, but today marks the two-year anniversary since ODB went "live" on November 11, 2011! Two years ago, just before Robert Griffin III's "Heisman Moment" against Oklahoma and after 3 months of behind-the-scenes preparation, ODB went live with its first post in history (the post itself is dated 9/9/2011, but wasn't actually available until 11/11). It's debatable whether the launch of ODB precipitated the Year of the Bear or simply benefited from it along with all of Baylor Nation. I think you know where I stand.

Since that point, when I had admittedly no clue how this was going to work or if we were ever going to be successful, we've grown considerably, adding new content and new contributors regularly in an effort to build the best free community for Baylor fans anywhere. Calendar year 2013 has been particularly successful: over 2/3 of all the pageviews that have ever happened on ODB have taken place in the first 10+ months of 2013. We have set and broken record after record for traffic en route to a place in the top 20 for SB Nation college blogs network-wide. Oh, and in August we launched OurDailyPodcast, which recently passed 20,000 historic downloads and has spent the last few weeks entrenched in the "New and Hot" section of the college and high school podcasts on iTunes (and is now on twitter!)

With the Bears undefeated and ranked #5 in the BCS, a new stadium opening in less than a year, and basketball just now getting underway with two more ranked teams, there's nowhere to go but up. I couldn't be more excited about where we are and where we are heading here on ODB, and I hope that everyone-- contributors and community members alike-- know how much I appreciate your involvement here at ODB.

If you need any more evidence of how far we've come, there's this: it took ODB fifteen months to pass 1 million pageviews, finally reaching that mark in the first week of February. The next million came almost exactly 7 months later at the start of September. We should pass 3 million some time this week, a little over 2 months later.

To celebrate ODB's birthday, I've decided that everything we do here will remain completely and totally free!

Deploy the Flag of Celebration!