State of the Voice April 23, 2012

Chris Davis, Editor, Pincher Creek Voice

The Pincher Creek Voice is now into our tenth month since rebooting.

We've experienced incredible growth in that time, and while the pace of growth has slowed somewhat in the last couple of months, we continue to draw new readers to the site, in a steady upward pattern.


We've added Google Analytics to our understanding of our audience demographics, and it's turning out to be a very useful tool.  Where before we were able to analyze pageviews primarily, we can now analyze actual "unique" visitors to our website.

We've had just over 173,000 pageviews at this site since mid July 2011.  Pageviews for the last 30 days was just over 29,000, or 966 pageviews a day, up 100 pageviews a day from the recent past.

From March 23 to April 22 there were 6,746 "unique" visitors, which is measured by the internet (ip) address of the incoming traffic.  Since so many of you view the voice on two devices (home computer/work computer or computer/phone) we'll cut that figure in half and guesstimate our monthly readership at this point is over 3000 people.  Like any other medium, we'll never know for sure.  Newspapers have no way to track how many people read the free issue at the coffee shops, for a parallel.

What we do know for sure is that lots and lots of you do read the Voice, many more than we quite frankly believed likely when we started this endeavor. Thanks!

While our readership is still primarily local, we've also seen that we have a strong and growing readership throughout the region and overseas.  We try to keep in mind that for many people we represent Pincher Creek, and while we don't promise to be a "good news" only effort, we do try to accentuate the positive whenever possible.

Our revenue is slowly but steadily growing as well, which gives us an increased optimism about the future of the Voice. Advertisers are reminded that our rates will increase somewhat as of June 1, 2012.  Even at our new rates we believe we're still the best deal around.  Also, check out our revamped classifieds page at www.pinchercreekclassifieds.com.

I want to again thank columnist Phil Burpee for being such a steady contributor to these pages, and we welcome Rob Bernshaw to our regular columnist ranks.  Bernshaw is an eloquent writer, and represents a generally more conservative point of view than Burpee does, and we believe the addition of his input brings some balance to our columnist content.  If you have something to say, we hope you'll consider the Voice as an outlet.

To that end I've brought back the open Forum, which flopped last time I tried it.  Our readership has grown considerably since then, so we're trying it again, and if it continues to flop after a couple of months we'll probably write off that idea as "good in principle, failed in practice".  If it takes off I think it could be an exciting way for our readers to be more directly engaged.

In closing, it's election day.  Vote!