Our readership

It seems that in our business there are two "Death Valley" readership periods, one more or less between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, the other approximately between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. When you think about it, that makes our business somewhat similar to US television --- people don't log onto the Internet or watch TV as much when they're on vacation or celebrating holidays.

This is only a 12-month chart, so it won't show that despite the big dip in readership during June, in that month we did much better than in the same month of 2002. The download statistics we get from our web server, Datarealm, leave certain questions unanswered, such as how many of our visitors are "unique" and exactly where a lot of our readers are located. The part of this chart to which we pay the most attention is the yellow bar graph at the upper right corner, which tracks the number of visitors to this site.

Were we the sort of folks who play sleazy little dot-com hustler games, we'd be emphasizing the green bars --- our "hits" --- which would give us a much larger but somewhat less relevant figure to flaunt before potential clients. However, we don't do that, nor do we indulge in the common Panamanian media practice of exaggerating or concealing our true readership data. Although most of this country's ad agencies work on the basis of family ties or kickbacks rather than market research, there actually are businesses whose owners prefer to make informed decisions about their publicity purchasing. Those are the companies that will get the most from their advertising budgets and it is largely for their benefit that we periodically publish our download information. We believe that in the long run such transparency makes good business sense.

Graphic by Datarealm

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Business & Economy Briefs
Harris case prompts international disputes
The Panama News readership logs