Half a million pageviews
Sometime today, January 7, the Pincher Creek Voice will hit half a million pageviews, a big milestone for us. We're a few days away from a year and a half of publishing the Voice, and we want to thank you, dear readers. We're proud of the work we do here and grateful that it reaches such an audience.
About 750 individuals visit this site on an average day, 7 days a week. In general you read two point something stories a visit. We get about 1400 pageviews on an average day. By last March we were getting about 850 pageviews a day, so the readership growth has definitely continued. Some of you visit daily, some of you visit several times a week, and some of you visit less frequently. About half of you live in the immediate area. In the course of an average month we get about 8000 "unique" visitors. We guess that probably translates into about 4000 actual individuals, but unfortunately there's no real way to tell. Some of you use one device to read the Voice. Some of you use several.
Sports has been very good to us, and we like to think we've been pretty good to Sports as well. However, we also take pride, time, and care to bring you locally relevant news of all sorts. We're the only news publication in the area that regularly brings you Town Council and MD Council news. We also keep you up to date with RCMP reports, Emergency Service reports, political and social events, 4-H and rodeo events, and the list goes on. We're doing our best to cover the spread, and to be as current and timely as we can be.
We're going through some growing pains at the moment. Revenue has been gradually increasing, but not by enough to actually hire more staff. At the same time, we're covering a whole lot of stuff, constantly. We'd actually like to cover more than we do. We'd actually prefer to be more timely than we sometimes can be. Some things do slip through the cracks. Please don't consider that an apology. If there's another news organization in Alberta providing their community with more daily news than we do (outside of Lethbridge, Calgary, or Edmonton) I'm not aware of it. And I've looked around. A lot. In my not so humble opinion, we've set a new standard. We've done that with very little going for us at the start except chutzpah and know-how. Our know-how has increased and our chutzpah is undiminished, so I'm predicting great things for our future. Excuse me, I dropped my humble pie again, let me just clean that up...
Sustainability
Our first priority with the Pincher Creek Voice has been to create and maintain as exceptional a product as possible. That's not likely to change. However, for this product to be meaningful it has to be sustainable, and we will be expending a fair bit of effort in that direction over the course of the next year. Frankly, the more profitable this business is the more likely it is to succeed long-term. We anticipate hiring more staff as we grow, both to handle some of the business side of things and to provide wider coverage of news, sports and events. That brings me to:
Advertising
That's what pays for this. To accommodate requests for larger sized ads I redesigned the site slightly last month. The space allotted for news is actually about the same size as it was, but it is now to the left of the page instead of in the centre. That allows for both advertising columns to be combined, which also allows for a larger advertising space at the top of the advertising side of the site. Ads still click through to our Classifieds page or to our advertiser's own link.
Prices for our previously existing ad sizes have not changed, and will not change this year. We've added several new options for those wanting bigger sized ads or a different layout than was previously available.
For a rundown of our various advertising options, click here.
We'll be advertising our advertising here on the front page soon, so enough about that for now.
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One again, thanks for reading. See you out there :)
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