business

To the best of our knowledge, The Panama News is the only online newspaper in Panama that periodically publishes our download statistics as we get them from our web server. Yes, we get more detailed breakdowns than this, which we will provide on request to advertisers, potential advertisers or even our competitors.

Now is this a stupid move when operating in a business culture in which publications from the sleazy necro-porn tabloid El Siglo to the would-be newspaper of record La Prensa make inflated claims about their readerships, in which misrepresentations of newspaper readerships or broadcast audiences are not considered crimes, and in which an inbred little oligarchy of ad agencies channels their clients' business to specific media not based on those clients' needs but on the basis of the agents' family or business ties?

Who knows? Even if we had the money to do worthwhile market research on the subject --- and we don't --- that sort of service is more or less unavailable in this country. So we have to learn as much as we can about our business and play hunches about the imponderables.

The Panama News operates on the hunch that sooner or later serious businesses will get tired of paying too much for too little, and that when they get smart about their advertising purchases we'll hold our own in the market because we have a lot of readers they'll want to reach with their commercial messages, we're competitively priced and we don't play dishonest games.

Were we the standard dot-com hustlers we'd be bragging about our hits --- 319,603 in a month sounds awfully impressive. However, visits --- the number of times people click onto the site --- is the more relevant number. Of course, those 30,082 visits in September represented our readership for the month's two issues. If, theoretically speaking, all of our readers come to the website once every issue, that would give us some 15,000 regular readers. But surely we get some once-in-awhile or one-time readers, and some who take more than one session to read an issue, and our download logs don't give us good "unique visitor" figures to sort such phenomena out in an acceptable way.

Although we don't know all that we'd like to know, we do know that our readership is bigger than ever, and is now about triple what it was when we began our major growth spurt in the middle of last year. The folks over at CNN.com aren't quite quaking in their boots yet, but then neither is The Panama News resting on its laurels.




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Business & Economy Briefs
Seguro Social after Jované
The Panama News breaks 30,000

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