The Revelstoke Current is three months old already and what a ride it has been! Revelstoke’s only online daily news site has shown phenomenal growth since it was launched on July 1.
At that time, only IT guru Shane McCallum (you can find out more about Shane at www.revsoftware.ca), my partner, Sue Leach, and I knew what it looked like and what I hoped it could become. As to its impact, well, I wanted a news site that would be all-Revelstoke-all-the-time. I was hopeful that it would be well received by you, its readers. I haven’t been disappointed and the feedback I receive suggests The Current hasn’t disappointed you, either.
Ensuring that The Current would be an all-Revelstoke-all-the-time news site has certainly kept me busy. Here are some very basic facts about content between July 1 and Sept. 30:
- Stories published since July 1 — 314 (including this one);
- Photos published since July 1 — 893;
- Videos posted since July 1 — 16 (incidentally, they have been collectively viewed 3,889 times); and
- Comments posted by readers since July 1 — 86
And all of these stories, photos, videos and comments are about our community, our events, our people. As far as I’m concerned, the bottom line when it comes to content is this: If it doesn’t happen here, doesn’t have some kind of bearing on our lives or doesn’t involve Revelstokians in some way then it doesn’t make it onto The Revelstoke Current.
Does that philosophy resonate with readers? Where is The Current right now in terms of readership?
I can tell you precisely because I installed Google Analytics on the site. Google Analytics (GA) is a tool that allows a website developer to accurate measure not just simple hits or visits but the cities, province, states, countries and continents they come from. It also tracks the pages people look at, the buttons they push, even the kinds of computer operating systems and web browsers they use. Well, only in general terms, mind you. I can’t tell if a particular individual is looking at The Current. But I think you get the idea.
Here’s what I know about The Revesltoke Current’s readership from July 1 until Sept. 30:
- Absolutely unique visitors who visited The Revelstoke Current website — 5,193;
- Visits to the site by those visitors — 18,250;
- The number of pages they have viewed — 80,139;
- The average number of pages viewed by each visitor — 4.39;
- The average time spent on the site by each visitor — 3:55 minutes;
- The countries visits came from — Canada (17,287), U.S. (626), UK (117), Germany (47), New Zealand (46), Australia (26), Mexico (16), Netherlands (15), South Africa (9), France (6), Italy (5), Norway (3), Finland (2), Denmark (2), Switzerland (2), Austria (2), Czech Republic (2), Spain (2), Ireland (2), Botswana (2), Russia (2), India (2), Antigua and Barbuda (2), Nigeria (1), China (1), Japan (1) and Thailand (1);
- The top ten Canadian cities that had Internet Service Providers used by visitors (This does not mean that’s where the visitors lived; it’s simply where their Internet Service Providers are located. For instance the preponderance attributed to Kamloops is doubtless due to the fact that it is the city where Telus located its computer servers used by its Revelstoke service subscribers) — Kamloops (8,044), Revelstoke (3,054), Kelowna (2,623), Vancouver (644), Victoria (440), Calgary (333), Edmonton (209), Ottawa (136), Don Mills (107) and Salmon Arm (101); and
- The top 10 visits from the U.S. — California (202), Oregon (151), Washington (98), Colorado (15), New York (12), Texas (10), Vermont (9), Pennsylvania (9), Virginia (8) and Tennessee (7).
One of the things that GA does is offer benchmarks against which you can measure your site’s progress. Google Analytics selects 100 sites against which The Revelstoke Current is measured. The only category in which it is below the benchmark is in new visits. And that’s probably due to a couple of things. First and most importantly, the people coming to the site are dedicated readers who want fresh news daily. And, second, there are still a lot of people in Revelstoke who either do not yet know about The Current or who are not wired in to the Internet.
Personally, I think these statistics herald a great start to The Revelstoke Current, and I anticipate continued growth over the coming months and years. Years? Yes, years. I made a commitment to this community a long time ago and I am most assuredly not packing up and leaving town. I love Revelstoke and its people and if my little news site and the print version I publish every Monday can help make this an even better place to live, then I think I’m doing my job the way it needs to be done.
The Revelstoke Current is, of course, primarily an online news site, but I do print 1,000 copies of a two-page paper every Monday that tells those people who aren’t — for one reason or another — hooked into the Internet about what’s going on in town. Like the online Current it is free and is distributed at a variety of locations around the city. About 900 of the print copies go home every Monday. That’s very gratifying.
There’s a lot more in the GA reports, but I think this gives you, the readers of The Revelstoke Current, a pretty clear snapshot of what’s been happening behind the scenes.
Thank you very much for reading The Revelstoke Current. I hope I will continue to earn that trust and support.
Please read the following stories to discover more about The Revelstoke Current:
https://legacy.revelstokecurrent.com//2009/10/02/why-expressing-your-opinion-matters
