[Admin]

Great, now we can prove that no one, but no one, reads the announcements.

Two things:
a) Instead of updating the counter for every announcement, you could just run a query that goes more or less like this:

UPDATE announcement SET visits = visits+1 WHERE forumid IN ($forumlist);

(generate $forumlist if needed). That way you only add one query instead of one per announcement.

b) Use the shutdown queries of vBulletin. An example can be found in showthread.php:

if ($noshutdownfunc) {
  $DB_site->query("UPDATE thread SET views=views+1 WHERE threadid='$threadid'");
} else {
  $shutdownqueries[]="UPDATE LOW_PRIORITY thread SET views=views+1 WHERE threadid='$threadid'";
}