The newspaper business is one thing; the online newspaper business in an entirely different animal. In traditional newspaper advertising, it’s completely subjective on how many people saw your ad. And they like it like that because they can throw newspapers out to a different town for a week and claim a larger circulation. However, in the online newspaper business, you can tell your advertiser EXACTLY what he or she is getting for their dollar. Even in radio, they go by Arbitron Ratings. Having been in radio for quite some time, I’m very familiar with the crapshoot that game can be when a small amount of people fill out a survey. Television is the same way with The Nielson Ratings, which is the same company as Arbitron Ratings.
The bottom line is that when all of those subjective numbers look good for a radio station or TV, they boast about them. And when they are not so good, people get fired and those numbers get hidden from their customers. As mentioned before, an online newspaper has no excuses. The data is at their fingertips if they are tracking it properly with Google Analytics. If anyone is hiding their online readership, there’s probably a reason for it.
So with all of that said, the curtain is being pulled back and the readership numbers are being revealed to the general public and not just future hopeful advertising customers. They say you’re only as good as your last 30 days, so here’s the last 30 days even without school having begun yet. I expect these numbers to have a significant jump starting next week (and keep in mind, Google Analytics didn’t pick up our readers for three days while the conversion was made to the new website last week) :
3,878 – Total visits to HoweEnterprise.com
2,082 users
7,361 page views
25-34 – the average age of the reader
54.15% – male readers