For January through April, 2011, the number of visits to MinnPost.com by Minnesotans (our most important metric) rose 30% compared with the same period a year ago. We’re currently averaging about 288,000 Minnesota visits a month.
Overall (including non-Minnesotans), visits rose 27%, compared with January through April of 2010; we’re now averaging 483,000 total visits a month.
Page views by Minnesotans have grown about 28%, to an average of 605,000 a month, and overall page views are up 25% to an average of 875,000. (About 60% of the visits to MinnPost come from Minnesota, but they account for 69% of the page views, because Minnesotans look at more pages per visit than non-Minnesotans.)
Our growth this year continues — and even accelerates — the traffic growth we reported in our 2010 end-of-year report. In the second half of 2010, visits by Minnesotans grew 18% over the same period in 2009.
We don’t expect to sustain 30% growth in Minnesota visits all year, because we’ll soon be running against those stronger second-half results. But I can say this to you, our readers: We’re pleased and grateful that you’re relying more and more on MinnPost to keep you informed about what matters to Minnesotans.
You’re also engaging more with us through social media.
We had just over 8,000 followers on Twitter at the end of 2010. We now have more than 10,500. We had about 3,500 likers on our main Facebook page, and we now have more than 4,350. So our social media presence has grown about 25% in four months. Our new Tumblr blog, which started late last year, has also shown substantial growth on a much smaller base.
Thanks for reading, talking about, sharing and linking to our stories. And if you’ve taken the next step to becoming a donor, thanks for that, as well. If not, please join the more than 2,500 people helping us pay the bills for the journalism you enjoy reading. Click to donate.
Seems to me you left out the ‘unique viewers’ or visitors. If I click on 6 pages per day or 15…. each day…… hmmmmmm.
Congratulations on a job well done. Minnpost is politically fair, and professionally produced. Read it daily.
MinnPost has its own perspective in a fairly limited media market in this state. It’s hard to be able to hide all bias, but I think MinnPost does a better job than all the local news networks.
Myles’ comment reminds of the famous passage in journalist Bernard Goldberg’s book “Bias,” which blew the lid off liberal favoritism in the nation’s newsrooms. Asked by Goldberg about the editorial leaning of the New York Times, CBS disgraced newsman Dan Rather responded: “Middle of the road.”
Eric, we had about 275,000 unique visitors last month. I don’t report that number because I consider it not meaningful: so many visitors come only once, either from search or a blog link, who are not local and not interested in Minnesota news. A more meaningful number, which can be calculated from Quantcast data, is that about 55,000 people are visiting MinnPost at least twice a month. By the way, we’re building a community of people who care about Minnesota, so we’re thrilled if someone comes to our site multiple times a day and/or clicks on multiple pages per visit.
From a satisfied reader from day 1, congratulation!
You need a “like” button so I can like this.
MinnPost slants way to the left, but in a fun way. Visiting this website is like going to an exotic foreign country where the locals have peculiar customs and beliefs. Sometimes you just have to shake your head and say,”What the heck?”