ITS Holiday Stand Down and a Huge Thank You!

First off we want to take a few minutes to thank each and every one of our loyal readers, Crew Members, Crew Leaders and Plank Owners! We wouldn’t be anywhere today without your support and encouragement!

We’ve grown so much over the last year and what an amazing year it’s been. There’s been such a positive response to all the information we’ve been providing this last year, from skill-set information to gear reviews; you guys have been soaking it up!

2010

ITS Tactical has experienced a 100% growth rate in 2010 going from an average of 60k unique people a month visiting in January to over 120k last month! Those aren’t hits or page views those are actually 120,000 different people enjoying the awesomeness! We’re definitely outgrowing our server too!

We’ve had the good fortune to have some fantastic writers contributing some killer content and we’d like to also thank each one of them for adding to the resource we’ve created here at ITS. Come January 3rd we’re going to have a big re-launch of ITS Tactical with a new look, updated navigation and other changes that will make your experience here even more enjoyable. We’ve got so many great articles, that important content is starting to get buried. To fix this, the hierarchy will also get a face lift so finding things will be less time consuming!

Our membership is also growing strong and getting a makeover come January too! We opened up our Plank Owner membership in February as a way to allow everyone to contribute to our growth and give you guys something great back in return, rather than simply asking for donations. Our first 250 memberships went quickly and was our cutoff for Plank Owners, a Navy term derived from the initial crew of a ship’s commissioning. While many benefits are the same for Plank Owners and our newest Membership level, Crew Leaders, there will always be certain benefits that will remain exclusive to our Plank Owners.

We’ve now had over 150 Crew Leaders sign up since opening the Membership and more are joining everyday! Our growth has largely been possible by the contribution and support of our Plank Owners and Crew Leaders, we wouldn’t have it any other way. If you feel you’re getting more than 14 ¢ a day in value from ITS, please consider  joining our growing community of supporters.

ITS was built to provide an open-source community of different methods, ideas and knowledge that could one day save your life.  A resource for everyone and a place to provide an unbiased perspective without pressure from advertisers.

Sponsors

We’re very fortunate to have sponsors that want to help support ITS Tactical and believe in our mission. We encourage you to consider these business when purchasing the equipment you need to get the job done, we choose our sponsors very carefully and with the help of our moderators in our Forum. You can be sure that these companies that appear here on ITS are here for you, so please join us in thanking them for their support!

While our contributions from sponsors directly benefit the growth of ITS just like our membership, we’ve set things up to where our Membership is our largest source of funding to grow ITS. This isn’t because we don’t value our sponsors, it’s so it’s clear who keeps ITS running. It’s YOU!

2011

There’s so much more to do and accomplish on ITS Tactical! 2011 is going to be a banner year we’re excited to show you everything we have in store!

We’ll be stepping away from ITS until January 3rd to spend some time with our families and get busy finishing up the Website and Membership redesign that we anticipate launching on the 3rd. Our store will remain open but we won’t be shipping anything out until we return on the 3rd. All orders placed in the last two days will be shipped out Monday.

Thank you once again for making all of this possible and for your continued support in 2010 and beyond! Have a  Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

Bryan Black
Editor-in-Chief, Founder

We’d like to leave you with a little holiday fun with some outtakes from our videos this year. Please don’t watch this one around the kiddos!