We're Growing — When Will We Hit 100,000 Daily Visitors?

April 11, 2026 by Richard Cross

A traffic analysis of minesweeper.org's first 17 days of data.

Minesweeper.org is growing. We've been tracking daily unique IPs since late March, and the trend is unmistakably upward. With data in hand we decided to fit a model to the numbers and ask the obvious question: when do we hit 100,000 unique visitors per day?

The honest answer is: it depends entirely on which growth scenario plays out. Here's what the data actually shows.

The Data: March 25 – April 10, 2026

Over 17 days we logged 15,322 total unique IPs, averaging 901 per day. Traffic peaked at 1,156 on April 7 and troughed at 583 on March 28. That swing of nearly 600 visitors in a single week is not noise — it's structure.

Unique IPs linear fit with 7-day periodic component

The Model: Linear Growth with a Weekly Heartbeat

The data fits a composite model well:

y(t) = 18.59 · t + 748.65 + (−95.63) · sin(2π·t/7 − 0.74)

The two parts tell different stories:

Linear trend (slope = 18.59): The site gains about 18–19 new unique visitors per day on average. This is the underlying growth engine.
7-day periodic component (amplitude ≈ 96): Traffic predictably rises mid-week and dips at weekends — a pattern every web publisher will recognise. The weekly cycle doesn't change the trend; it just oscillates around it.

Three Scenarios for 100,000 Daily Visitors

The 17-day window is too short to know whether we're in linear, exponential, or some other growth regime. Each assumption produces a very different answer.

Scenario 1 — The Pessimist: Pure Linear Growth (~November 2040)

If the site adds exactly 18.59 new visitors per day, forever, we reach 100,000 around 4 November 2040 — roughly 5,339 days or 14.6 years from now. This is mathematically the most conservative reading of the model.

Almost no successful web property grows purely linearly for 14 years. But it's the floor.

Scenario 2 — The Optimist: Daily Percentage Growth Holds (~October 2026)

The model's slope of 18.59 on a baseline of 748.65 implies a daily growth rate of about 2.5%. If that percentage rate is sustained (compounding daily rather than adding a flat amount), we hit 100,000 in roughly 200 days — around 10 October 2026.

That would be remarkable but not impossible for a site in early viral growth. It also assumes nothing slows us down for the next seven months.

Scenario 3 — The Middle Path: Weekly Compounding (~April 2027)

Week 1 (March 25–31) averaged 826 unique IPs/day. Week 2 (April 1–7) averaged 900 IPs/day. That's a 9% week-over-week gain. If we sustain 9% weekly growth, we cross 100,000 in about 56 weeks — around 18 April 2027.

A year of compounding 9% weekly is aggressive but plausible for a site with active development, new features shipping regularly, and growing word-of-mouth. This is our best-guess scenario.

What Could Accelerate Growth?

A few things could push us toward the optimistic end:

PvP matchmaking — competitive multiplayer brings players back daily and drives sharing.
New puzzle modes — jigsaw, 15-puzzle, tentaizu, and globesweeper all give people a reason to return or discover the site for the first time.
SEO compounding — early organic traffic builds backlinks, which drive more organic traffic. This is inherently exponential, not linear.
Word of mouth — a single viral moment (a streamer, a Reddit post, a school) can add thousands of IPs overnight.

What Could Slow It Down?

Equally, several factors could push us toward the linear (pessimistic) end:

Growth plateaus are natural once initial novelty wears off.
Competing minesweeper sites have years of SEO lead.
We're a small team — shipping speed matters.

Our Bet

We're betting on somewhere between the middle and optimistic scenarios — meaning a realistic target of 100,000 daily unique IPs by mid-2027, assuming we keep shipping, keep the site fast, and keep the community growing.

We'll revisit this analysis in 90 days with more data. By then we'll have a much clearer picture of which curve we're actually on.

If you want to help us get there faster: share a puzzle, challenge a friend to a duel, or just come back tomorrow.

— The Lady Di's Mines Team