By David F. Rooney
The Revelstoke Current is now one year old and doing rather nicely — thanks to the thousands of people who visit it on a regular basis.
According to Google Analytics, the program that track visitors to the site, 29,234 people visited The Current 160,887 times during its first year and read its stories and comments and looked at photo pages 593,334 times. While individual visitors’ reading habits and time spent on the website varied, depending upon what was happening, over all, the average visitor looked at 3.69 pages and spent an average of 3.24 minutes on The Current during the course of the year.
The Front Page (201,074 visits), News (30,597 visits), Community (24,511 visits), Obituaries (14,591 visits) and Opinion Sections (11,648 visits) were the five most heavily visited portions of the website. Marketplace was visited 11,465 times, Business 11,132, Sports 9,640, Arts & Entertainment 7,094, the Environment Section 5,335 times, Education 5,266 and Savage Delights 2,534.
The top three stories were:
- Avalanche on Boulder Mountain traps sledders — 1,798;
- Jim Holdener, one of the nicest people in town, dies suddenly — 1,712; and
- Why does food cost more in Revelstoke — 1,576.
The Current produced and uploaded 80 videos on its YouTube Channel. They were viewed 22,903 times. The Top Three videos were: Boulder Mountain Avalanche, featuring Mayor David Raven, with 5,830 views; Revelstoke’s Unit 5 Turbine on The Move, which was watched 1,719 times; and The 2010 Polar Bear Plunge, with 1648 views.
Ask where The Current’s readers come from and the answer is simple — all over the world. Most readers, 154,548, were in Canada, of course. But 3,198 came from the United States, 508 from the United Kingdom, 386 from Sweden, and 284 from Australia. The rest came from 72 countries on every continent (see the image below).
And then, of course, there is the two-page print version of The Current that appears on Mondays. That did quite well this year with between 800 and 900 of its 1,000 printed copies going home.
All things considered The Current’s first year has been an excellent one and for that I thank all of its readers and contributors. Without your support and help this would be just so much digital hooey on the web.
