Big jump in readership, thanks to CCA attacks
Our thanks go out to the CCA and especially to Tom Gentz,
Ruth Platner, Mike Chambers and Lisa DiBello for attacking Progressive Charlestown as “cyber-bullies” who present their good civic deeds in an unfavorable light.
As people came to check out what all the fuss was about, we
saw the number of daily page-reads[1]
jump from October through December to over 1300 a day and sometimes as high as
2000 a day.
November was our biggest month ever with 45,307 page-views, an average of 1,510 page-reads every day.
Just a year prior, we thought it was a good day when 300 or 400 people visited the website and clicked on an article.
November was our biggest month ever with 45,307 page-views, an average of 1,510 page-reads every day.
Just a year prior, we thought it was a good day when 300 or 400 people visited the website and clicked on an article.
Anyway, due to that big spike in readership, we hit the half
million milestone on January 8 (at 3:14 PM). I had hoped we might hit that mark on New
Year’s Day but just missed with 489,617 at midnight.
Since Tom Ferrio and I started Progressive Charlestown, we have published over 3,100 articles. Many of them are original works, but we also have run our own quirky selection of cartoons, recipes, state and national political articles, and content-sharing from our friends at RI Future and EcoRI.
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| Screen shot of page-view counter at 3:14 PM, January 8 |
Even though we are not on Tom Gentz’s Christmas card list,
we know from our readership stats (not to mention all the comments, e-mails and
face-to-face conversations) that there are a lot of people who check us out
every day. Some because they don't like us, but many because they do.
Aside from our progressive political slant and our attempts
at humor, we draw a lot of heat for investigative reporting. While our critics
like to call us liars and bullies, they can’t back it up with facts, as we have
repeatedly challenged them to do. By contrast, we back up what we say with links to documents and detail on our sources.
In the past year, we weighed in on town scandals like
Y-Gate, the Battle for Ninigret Park, and the CCA “Kill Bill” purge. I’d like
to think we made a difference for digging out and presenting the facts and not
pulling our punches.
We’ll keep on going as long as this thing works and we still
enjoy doing it, because heaven knows, we’re not doing this for any money. So
thank you, Progressive Charlestown readers and thank you, CCA, for helping to
build our numbers.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] A “page-read” gets tallied when a person actually clicks on an individual article to see it in its entirety. This is different than a “hit” which simply means somebody clicked on our website, even for a second or two. A page-read is a deliberate act of clicking on the article to read the entire text.
[1] A “page-read” gets tallied when a person actually clicks on an individual article to see it in its entirety. This is different than a “hit” which simply means somebody clicked on our website, even for a second or two. A page-read is a deliberate act of clicking on the article to read the entire text.