2015 was a pretty amazing year for Vancouver Is Awesome. I know I keep repeating this but our focus was to bring you more of what you really wanted to see, delivering a ton of food lists, travel suggestions, outdoors features, local events, photos, profiles of people, cheap living tips, local Kickstarter projects, history and more. A couple years ago I actually thought our traffic had plateaued but as you can see below we've seen some fairly wild growth; this year we finally broke 500,000 page views in a single month and continue to average 350,000. In 2015 we nearly doubled the amount of Likes to our Facebook Page, which doubled the year before. Every week 650 new people found their way to our Page. Chances are you found your way to this article by clicking on a link to it from there. Not only did we increase the number of Likes but we also hit well above our weight class having one of the best performing Pages. Up against other media in the city ours is now ranked 4th. My intention here isn't to toot our own horn but to thank you as a reader for helping us get here, and to give you a look inside our business a little bit. What we do is not to be confused with journalism. Our goal as a lifestyle media company is to only bring you stories of the awesomeness that keeps you living in this city, despite all of the bad that surrounds you. We publish a ton of organically sourced stories that people love to read balanced alongside sponsored content, and in a perfect world for us the two of these things intermingle and become one. While we don't always nail it a really great example of this is our On The Road series presented by Toyota BC. We take you on road trips to spots we hope you'll visit, and a car company helps us get there. Everybody wins. One of our most popular pieces of content for the year was a roundup of these trips that we published back in June. The slideshow from it is below. A small percentage of the stories we do are sponsored, in fact the average ratio is about 24 non-sponsored stories for every 1 that we get paid to post. You'll know when they fall into the latter category because they'll say SPONSORED POST or PRESENTED BY at the top of them. The flip side of the coin is when we sponsor things and offer major support for free to efforts we feel are worthwhile. We take our large Facebook and Twitter audience and leverage those to support organizations making your city more awesome. Here's a list of who we had official sponsorships in place with in 2015, many of them we've actually been supporting for years: Creative Mornings The Vancouver Public Library The Vancouver Heritage Foundation PuSh Festival Sam Sullivan's Public Salon Talent Time So It Is: Vancouver Interesting Vancouver #SingItFwd Vancouver Gallery Hop Vancouver Draw Down Vancouver Creatives 2 The PSF's Pink Salmon Festival Vancouver Mini Maker Faire Vancouver International Improv Festival This Open Space Vancouver Startup City A Good Book Drive ROAM Expo V.I.A. has changed a lot since I founded it in 2008, and not just our content. We now employ two people full time as well as a few part time staff. We have an actual office, and we have legal and accounting bills. At the end of the day the advertising and sponsored content on our site goes to support my small family and others, and it allows us to keep this thing going. We're doing our best to make it as useful as we can moving forward. For you. Thanks to everyone who has followed us over the years. New readers and old, you're the reason we've been able to turn this positivity machine into an actual business. I can solemnly promise you that despite any changes our core mission remains the same: to remind you of all of the awesomeness of Vancouver.