A couple of weeks ago I wrote a silly little Sunday feature, listing the top ten UNESCO ‘at risk’ cities: rounding up other World Heritage Sites on the naughty stair. Nothing particularly earth shattering. A flippant piece of fun. Who doesn’t love a top ten? Or, for that matter, seven?

But the innocuous post elicited a stern rebuke from a regular reader along the lines of ‘why is SevenStreets so desperate for hits? Are you having a slow traffic day? I’m very disappointed in this feature…’ Disagreeing with stuff we write is all grist for the mill. But the accusation that were all about the hits stung. All I was actually doing was writing something that amused me.

When did the biggest insult you could hurl at a site become ‘you want hits’? What’s the alternative? Write for Google Docs, and don’t share your password?

The response raised the elephant in the website room. The H bomb.

We like to think we’re a community, us website writers, artists and opinion-mouthers. But ask a site owner to show us your hits…and we kinda go all shy. Yeah us who, given any opportunity, are desperate to share our innermost minutiae to the wired world.

Odd that, innit?

Is it a crime to post stuff you know its nothing but a bit of hit candy? Is it cynical to linkbait to death your tweets and FB posts?

It’s something I’ve wrestled with at SevenStreets. But here’s how I see it. If it’s your site, and you genuinely post what you’re interested in, something you’d like to read, and write it to the best of your ability (without cynically trying to second guess what will ‘go’ ‘viral’), you can sleep at night.

All of which means that, often, stuff you post will elicit a trickle of response. We’re chipping away at the margins here. A feature on the Arabic Arts Festival will, if you’re lucky, huff and puff its way to 500 hits. But you post it because you genuinely want to direct your readers to something amazing in their midst.

But that’s all a bit disingenuous if you don’t have an audience, yeah? Or if you’re merely reinforcing your message to the already converted.

So now and again, it’s cool to have those water-cooler features: you know, the ones that make your stat graph look like a series of teepees in a gently undulating field.

They’re the only way we know you’re going to increase your audience without paying Facebook to promote your posts, or selling your soul away with SEO snake oil. It’s the only thing we’ve done since launch.

But these features are the big guns. And with all heavy artillery, you have to handle with care. With a decent audience comes responsibility.

And so it was that yesterday I was given the nod to a feature about Amanda Moss’s Lifestyle events. And I knew it was going to be something that struck a chord.

But, equally, after stories like this, and like this, I was determined to do something more constructive with it this time.

A scurrilous story about a marmite business person would get hits, sure. But how to harness them?

And so we struck up the idea of making a sure-fire hit harvest into a force for good - and we asked SevenStreets readers - for once - to retweet (we find that a bit non-u, if we’re honest) and we politely suggested, for those who could, a donation of a quid or two.

Wow.

In 24 hours you directly raised over £500 - and, we understand, Clatterbridge received the same amount directly. That’s £1,000 - which, in a neat echo of the original feature, was the amount Amanda was hoping her Wirral Fashion event would have raised. And, as this is a charity close to my heart, it brought a tear to my eye. Probably more than one, actually.

But more than that, the feature kickstarted a conversation. Your words far outweighing ours - and, (dammit) on the whole, they were wiser too. It invited 100 or so people to share their stories - good, bad and fifty shades of grey intbetween (and plenty I can’t post, sorry).

And this, above all else, is why this website is something I’m dead chuffed to be a part of.

All of which shows something. Hits can be good, too.

Thank you.