I’m suddenly feeling much better about how my small newspaper is doing online after a recent post by Poynter’s Sam Kirkland that said:
“The latest report by analytics firm Parse.ly indicates large news sites see a greater percentage of visitors return within 30 days than small news sites do. … Sites with more than 10 million monthly visitors saw a 16 percent return rate, while sites with fewer than 1 million monthly visitors saw a 9 percent return rate. … Across Parse.ly’s entire network, an average of 11 percent of visitors returned to a site within 30 days.”
The monthly return rate on newstopic.net currently is 59.9 percent, if our Google Analytics are to be believed.
But I don’t know why that should be surprising. Unless you have local ties, you would not have much reason to seek out the content available from the News-Topic. If the hypothesis is that reader loyalty ought to make our site more attractive to online advertisers, then our site is an undiscovered gem, though our audience size (about 36,000 visitors in the past month) makes it a tiny gem.
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