The Panama News readership figures

The Panama News is closing in on 400,000 hits per month. See the green bars in the above graph provided by our webserver Datarealm, and the number at the upper left-hand corner, to know the number and the trend.

Every dot-com hustler talking to someone who doesn't know the Internet very well likes to emphasize hits, because it's a bigger number than the really important one, visits. Although it's imprecise because it doesn't take into account multiple visits to the website by the same person, or multiple people reading the online paper in one visit from the same computer, visits make it possible to roughly estimate how many people read The Panama News. Visits are shown by the yellow bars at the upper right part of the graph, and the number in that corner is our maximum, which took place during a readership spike in November, Panama's centennial month. Since this past October we have been consistently getting more than 1,000 visits per day, or more than 15,000 visits per issue.

The number of "hits" tells us that most people who come to this website read most or all of The Panama News, and our reader survey and hunches confirm that and tell us that most of our readers are regulars. We can conservatively estimate from these data that we have more than 10,000 regular readers. Every time one of you clicks onto a page, an ad or a button during the course of a visit to this website, depending on what comes up that's one or more hits.

So why the surge in hits that wasn't matched by a proportional increase in visits? Most likely because we had more content in recent issues and because production delays caused multiple clicks onto pages that were not ready for a day or more past our usual upload dates.

So why is the editor telling you this instead of strutting around and beating his chest about how big The Panama News is becoming? Because he respects the readers' intelligence and wants advertisers to respect this newspaper's integrity.

Search engine results indicate that we are one of Panama's most-visited websites, apparently ahead of much bigger daily newspapers' online editions. However, on the Internet it is possible to buy one's way to the top of a search engine list or bribe a company to declare a website the "best" or "biggest" or "leading." The Panama News doesn't have the money to do that, nor would we be inclined to do so if we did. The best we can do is publish the figures we get from our webserver --- something that Panama's other online publications refuse to do --- and hope for the day when there is an honest and impartial rating service to help advertisers make their online ad purchasing decisions.

Also in this section:
Business & Economy Briefs
Controversy over ship security inspections
US government report on RP money laundering
EXPOCOMER 2004
The Panama News readership figures

business

We set a record for hits in February, but don't read too much into that fact