Money may not be able to buy happiness, or love, so it’s said, but in some cases, it can buy time. For us, money *from* WSB will buy more time we can devote *to* WSB. 
So this morning, we are thrilled to welcome our first advertiser: HOTWIRE COFFEE, celebrating its fifth anniversary in that cool brick building by the Junction post office. We are grateful to Hotwire proprietor Lora Vickrey and our other sponsors-to-be for supporting WSB and our mission to offer you 24/7/365 West Seattle news, information, and discussion. Want to join them? More info on our new Advertising page; and for everybody here in WSB-land, here’s our commitment:
For WSB advertising, our priority is to offer space to local advertisers, businesses that offer goods and services to people in West Seattle. So far we’ve avoided the free-for-all type ads you see cluttering some sites. But for us to keep improving this site and offering you more 24/7/365 news, information, and discussion, we can’t be ad-free. We had a heartening response to WSB Pledge Day two months ago, yet user-paid content in general isn’t the way of the online world right now (subscriptions didn’t even work for big organizations like the New York Times), so we seek to follow in the pixelsteps of the handful of successful, self-sustaining “hyperlocal” news sites, mom-n-pop sites that have blazed new trails here and there around the country, such as Baristanet in NJ.
West Seattle is the city’s biggest neighborhood, both in population and acreage, so there’s a lot to cover, and we’ve barely scratched the proverbial surface. As our coverage volume increases, so does our visitor volume — in October, for example, each weekday averaged more than 3,000 homes/businesses (it’s tough to count individual people online — measurement systems note “IP addresses,” so several people at one home or business would count as only one “unique user”) and double that many pageviews. This was quadruple the total for last January, after steady growth all year long.
But enough about numbers. If we didn’t provide anything of interest or relevance to you, you’d be out of here, and we wouldn’t blame you. So please keep telling WSB editors what you want to know about, and best of all, sharing your stories, photos, and tips. And if you know someone whose business might benefit from advertising here, please point them to us — via this page, or by e-mailing our Sales Guy at salesguy@westseattleblog.com.
Thanks again for being there – WSB’s 2-year anniversary is around the corner, but since it’s become so much more than originally intended, every day feels like a brand-new start.
| 17 COMMENTS