The roots of the Times-News as Alamance County’s newspaper date back to 1887.
That is a long time.
TheTimesNews.com hasn’t been serving the area for even close to that long, over a decade to give you a ballpark figure, but its audience now stretches far outside the walls of Alamance County.
I want to share some interesting facts about TheTimesNews.com that even I didn’t know about until recently.
For instance, did you know that at least nine people from every state in the U.S. have visited our Web site this month? North Carolina, of course, is the leading state with over 50,000 visitors so far in May. Next comes Georgia, California and Virginia with around 2,000 each.
Visitors at TheTimesNews.com also span 117 countries. Obviously, the United States tops all countries with over 72,000 visitors this month. Next comes our neighbor to the north, Canada, followed by the United Kingdom and India. I don’t know why seven people from Nigeria and Costa Rica and 12 from Egypt logged on to TheTimesNews.com, but they did.
We monitor our Web site traffic through a company called Omniture. What Omniture does is track when, where and how many times people visited our Web site. It also tells us what people are clicking so that we can see what people are interested in. Through Omniture data we are able to see that crime stories and stories about pets and animals are much more popular to online readers than most feature stories.
With our data we can see how many people and page views we receive from cities around the world. It’s pretty amazing. For example, who would have known that of our Canadian visitors, the majority live in Ontario? That is such a random statistic, but I think it’s pretty interesting.
Most of the visits from other states and countries can be credited to Google searches, which bring people to our Web site through searching for a topic or name rather than typing in our specific Web address. Other visits could come from people who used to live in Alamance County but have moved. Our Web site allows them to stay current with Alamance County news from anywhere in the world.
Another explanation for visits outside of North Carolina could be from e-mailing links to stories on our site. Oftentimes a controversial or interesting story is forwarded to friends. I do this all the time. If something is interesting I might pass it along to friends and family if I think they might enjoy it. We like when people do this. Feel free to share links to our content all the time.
Do these statistics mean anything? Right now, not really, but they will. We are continuously trying to expand our audience and grow. We haven’t put much effort into growing globally or even regionally, but expanding in Alamance County and North Carolina have become high priorities. For now, we’ll leave the rest of the world to the big guys like CNN and FOX News.
Online editor Alex Kreitman can be reached at alex_kreitman@link.freedom.com. You can also read his sports blog at alexkreitman.freedomblogging.com.
When I wrote “digital device” I was thinking more along the lines of a thin paper-like device about the size of a newspaper front that you can hold and read. Instead, news is being sent digitally to mobile phone screens around the world. I like that idea better.
Our Facebook page has 75 fans and right now is basically just a place where we can share what we’re up to and post photos, videos and other stuff. We also have an automatic feed of stories from our Web site that display on our Facebook page. This feature provides users with headlines and links to read stories that are posted at TheTimesNews.com.
We currently have 47 people following us on Twitter and that numbers continues to grow.
