Today, October 20, 2026, is Day 1 of a public experiment. Over the next 100 days — through Day 100 on January 27, 2027 — we are going to try to grow MITBBS from a small bilingual news site into a publication read by 100,000 people a day. And we are going to publish the record as we go, whatever it shows.

Why do this in the open? Because growth stories are usually told backwards, after the win, with the embarrassing parts edited out. We locked our definitions before we started: a daily reader is a real human visitor (bots filtered out) who reads at least one content page, counted on Eastern Time days. No redefining the target mid-flight.

The honest starting line is humbling. By a generous count, about 7,348 human visitors a day touch the site — but only around 55 a day are genuinely engaged readers who go past a single page. Search engines send us roughly 33 page views a day, which is effectively zero. Our YouTube channel has 18 subscribers. If we are honest, the engaged audience we are growing from is closer to zero than to the headline number — which is exactly why the experiment is interesting.

The plan, in one paragraph: earn search and Google Discover traffic with fast, well-structured pages and evergreen explainers (our immigration Q&A library is the first sprint); grow the new English edition alongside the Chinese one; turn our daily videos into a real YouTube presence; and let returning readers compound through push, forums and habit. Each channel has a budget in the plan, and each week we will say what worked and what flopped.

Maybe we hit 100K. Maybe we land at 20K and publish the autopsy. Either way, the paper comes out on Day 100 — the data, the decisions and the mistakes included. Follow along here on the blog.