Here is a short 2008, year-end report for adn.com. It has been an amazing year. We averaged 2 million unique visitors, 14.6 million page views, and 3.4 million “visits” a month.

We especially like the visit measurement because it shows just how engaged our audience is with our content: news, features and advertising. (A visit is when one person is continuously active on the site for at least 30 minutes.)

This year’s peak traffic came in September, with 24.8 million page views and 4.4 million unique visitors. The reasons for the high traffic in September are pretty obvious: the intense national interest in Gov. Sarah Palin and the fact the Daily News was uniquely situated to provide it. To a lesser degree, the same was true of the trial of Sen. Ted Stevens and his ultimately unsuccessful re-election effort.

September’s traffic put us among the top 30 newspaper websites in the U.S.

Even before the big news around the election, adn.com’s readership had been strong and growing. In March, driven by the Iditarod, we hit what was until then our highest monthly traffic ever. But readership, instead of dropping off after the Iditarod, continued to grow throughout the spring and summer. And then came the election.

The credit for this success really belongs to every member of our newsroom staff. Some of our folks are more focused online than others, but everyone is involved.

In the same year we achieved such phenomenal audience growth, we also coped with a 40 percent reduction in staff. I can’t say enough about the great staff of the Daily News, and that includes many who are no longer at the paper.

To all our readers and advertisers, present staff and former staff, thanks for a great year.