The theme of our most widely circulated story this past week was – don’t miss an opportunity to tell people how much you love/appreciate them. We keep trying to find the right time to tell you exactly that, but there’s always one more story that needs to be written, one more e-mail to answer … but finally here in the middle of the post-Super Bowl night, we’re going to just stop and say: THANK YOU.
The occasion: January’s final numbers for WSB readership are in, and it was a record-setting month:
*First month ever with more than 1,100,000 pageviews (final total: 1,165,345 pageviews for January 2012)
*First month ever with more than half a million visits (final total: 500,844 visits for January 2012)
The previous WSB records were set last October, the first month ever with more than a million WSB pageviews, part of a big 2011 that we never just stopped down for a second to mention either:
*2011 WSB pageviews: 11,150,130 (up 20 percent from 2010)
*2011 WSB visits: 4,773,957 (a million more than the year before)
Most important are items for which we don’t have an exact count – the story tips, photos, traffic reports shared by phone, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter; the comments and forum posts (part of what led to the Society of Professional Journalists‘ 2011 “Online Engagement” award); the votes that brought WSB the “Best of Western Washington” award for a second year, and other honors including Seattle Magazine Reader’s Choice and “Best News Website” in the Seattle Weekly’s Seattle Web Awards.
We continue working in hopes of deserving your support, such as adding new features that were requested in our May 2011 survey (like the WSB West Seattle Restaurant Guide and the WSB Weather page). In progress now, we’re upgrading the Events Calendar from text-only to a true calendar with entries including maps, links, and a unique link for each entry so you can share it if you’d like (Speaking of sharing, we recently upgraded “Share This” – the link you can click at the end of any WSB story or page – and it’s a cleaner way to e-mail, Facebook-share, or tweet any WSB story or page, OR to access dozens of other sharing/bookmarking services if they are your fave/s). This is also our fifth year of being there for you on Facebook and Twitter too, and appreciative of your support and participation there, with the odometer about to turn to 6,000 “likes” on the FB page we launched last year after maxing out the original WSB “profile”-style page launched in 2007.)
So again … THANK YOU. And thanks to the local businesses that sponsor WSB, enabling us to stay in business coordinating, uncovering, and publishing community-collaborative news 24/7. Though we’re already well into 2012, it still feels shiny and new – maybe it’s the past few days of sunshine! – and we hope you share our optimism in looking forward to everything else it will bring. – Tracy & Patrick, co-publishers
| 18 COMMENTS