Progressive Charlestown hits another big milestone

Three-quarters of a million individual page views

By Will Collette

The Progressive Charlestown odometer registered another big number: 750,000 page views. That happened sometime early Sunday morning.

As Charlestown’s most notorious blog, we draw a lot of readers interested in our mix of local news, political scandals, things to do, jokes and cartoons, recipes, environmental coverage, health tips and whatever else that interests us, and might interest you.

“Page views” is a way of counting readership that is very different than “hits.” For a page view to get counted, a visitor to Progressive Charlestown has to actually click on an article to read it. A “hit” simply means somebody visited our website and may or may not have read anything. As a rule of thumb, it takes about ten hits to produce one page view – yes, I know, TMI.

Anyway, we do pay attention to what people read and can usually count on hundreds of readers each time we do original reporting on town affairs such as the craziness of the Town Council, the CCA’s endless crusade against the Narragansett Indians, the Whalerock controversy, last year’s “Y-Gate” Scandal, “Kill Bill” Campaign and “Battle for Ninigret Park.”

Our election coverage rocketed up our readership to almost 1,900 a day. Since then, the numbers have settled down to an average of 1,350 to 1,400 per day. It goes way up during the week, especially when there’s a Town Council meeting, and tamps down to the 1200+ range on weekends.

Last month’s average was a shade under 1,400 a day.

By the numbers, our biggest all-time stories have been environmental. The top three articles were on do-it-yourself solar energy, how recycling is good but reuse and reduction is better, and on why you should compost. Those three stories alone had a total of 18,000 readers.

We have published over 4,100 articles and over 3,500 comments. We have rejected 813 comments, almost all of them anonymous. Since we eliminated “anonymous” as an option for posting comments, we have had a lot fewer trolls and a whole lot less commercial spam writers posing as commenters. 

We used to get dozens of those a day. If you want to comment, we expect you to identify yourself.

Our reason for being is to bring you the news, reveal the truth, help to educate and enlighten, make you laugh and sometimes – well, lots of the time – make you angry, and entertain.

We know that in this day and age, lots more people rely on the internet for information. As a lover of newspapers and books, I lament that shift, but as they say, it is what it is. Since most people either don’t have the time, or don’t know how, to find the kind of information we deliver on Progressive Charlestown, I also like to think we provide a public service.

But whatever it is that we’re doing, on any given day, there are about 1,400 who decide they want to read Progressive Charlestown. Thank you for reading and we hope you’ll keep coming back.