We’re doing pretty well at the Hayride lately. This month we’re averaging a little over 10,000 unique visitors a day and a little under 20,000 page views (we’re actually at almost 25,000 page views a day on weekdays so far in October; weekend traffic drops off by 50 percent or so). Compete.com had our unique visitor count for September at 170,000, and we’re pacing well ahead of that number this month.

It’s not the busiest we’ve ever been, but it’s a very solid traffic number and it’s coming very steadily, not just from one link on the site that pulls traffic from everywhere.

And on the whole, our base of traffic is growing a little each month if you take away some of the seasonal variations and traffic spikes that come from out of the blue every now and then.

Turns out that’s a trend Keith Olbermann isn’t replicating at his new digs at Current TV…

Keith Olbermann is not in the witness protection program, but he might as well be. His show on Al Gore’s Current TV(America’s least watched network) has lost nearly a third of its viewers in four months.

Pretty impressive result for $10 million a year. That’s just his salary.

Countdown with Keith Olbermann was a major draw when it was onMSNBC. On January 21, the network took a big hit when Olbermann announced on air that that would be his last show for them. Then in June, Current launched Olbermann and Countdown.

It was no surprise that Olbermann drew a big audience for its early shows – averaging 106,000 viewers a night. Unfortunately, by August it was down to 79,000. Last month’s numbers were even worse. Olbermann’s average was down to 46,000 viewers and was in no danger of coming close to breaking into the top 30 cable TV news shows. None of the top 30 is all that impressive in terms of audience. For the third quarter of this year No.1 Bill O’Reilly had 2.8 million total viewers, while No. 30 – the 12 AM showing of Dr. Drew on HLN – had 435,000.

If Olbermann loses another third of his viewers in four months and we continue gaining at the rate we’ve gained over the last four, we’ll be pretty close to beating him – at least in terms of page views compared to his audience size.

And we’re still a relatively small, state-based blog site almost nobody’s ever heard of.

Being a bigger deal than Keith Olbermann isn’t exactly what you’d call runaway ambition. Being a bigger deal than Keith Olbermann less than two years after starting this site from scratch, however, would be a highly entertaining achievement.

Hey, tell your friends about us. Maybe we can claim Olbermann’s scalp by Christmas!