Fair is fair; last night, I noted the Star Tribune's web traffic, measured by "unique" visitors, was down 37 percent from November to December, the largest drop among Top 30 newspaper sites. But what about your friends here at MinnPost?
Our November-December drop was 19 percent, according to Google Analytics. (The Strib stats came from Nielsen Online.) We didn't publish for the final week of December, but that's usually a slow several days.
Because two different ratings services are in play, it's hard to compare absolute numbers of uniques. But according to GA, our 13-month-old outpost had 180,600 uniques in December compared to the 2.2 million Nielsen gave to the Strib. We had 223,800 uniques in November.
A Strib source called me with the long view; despite last month's falloff, startribune.com uniques soared 53 percent from December 2007 to December 2008. MinnPost wasn't using GA in December 2007 (our first full month), so I can't tell you our year-over-year growth yet.
Recent Stories
Most Commented
-
33 comments
-
30 comments
-
26 comments
-
20 comments
-
19 comments
Comments (8)
I think your comparing apples and oranges. I think the fact that you only had three week month in Dec more than explains your drop from Nov. Your also using different measurement instruments. Did you have a similar drop last year? I predict Strib will continue to slide while your numbers will increase.
One last thing. I think the assumption that the re-count would have increased traffic is a bogus assumption to begin with. Normal human beings who voted way back in November are sick of the election by December, especially this election, people were sick of this election in advance. Americans, even Minnesotans have the attention span of a diary product. Beyond who won, I don't think people were really interested in the day to day wrangling over votes. And I thought the Strib did not do a very good job of covering the recount anyways. I ended up going to Minnpost and MPR most of the time.
While we do not have a full year of Google Analytics data on MinnPost.com traffic yet, we can go back to February, 2008. In that month, our unique visitors totaled 79,578. So the December 2008 total of 180,629 represents an increase of 127% since February.
I have needled you over the last few weeks. I am impressed with your honesty, and my faith is restored in some bloggers.
I wish nothing but the best for MinnPost.
This is one of the very few lefty websites (dare I say news sources?) that I find temperate enough to read seriously (to say nothing of not being funded on the sly by lefty kooks with big pockets).
I'm not even going to make a predictable, and utterly smarmy, call for a couple of conservative writers to "balance" things out.
Stay lefty; just as long as you never succumb to the temptation to consider yourselves as "unbiased" I'll continue to return and to recommend the site to others.
Lefty? You mean not lunatic right, right?
No surprise with the Star Trib's decline. Since the redesign, their website is almost unreadable. It's like they've secretly entered into a contest with the PiPress to see who can create the most ugly/useless/non-functional website. It's a toss-up. Congrats to both.
No Bill; wrong. As always, I mean what I say. Lefty, as in fans of left wing politics.