The Panama News readership trends

If you consider the concept through northerly American eyes, summer is never over in Panama. If English is your second language and go to your English-Spanish dictionary to look up "summer" you will come up with the word "verano," which will be confusing if you think of that Spanish word in its Panamanian usage (dry season, which ended some months ago). If you consult an English-language calendar that has astronomical information, you are likely to find that "summer" means the time between the June solstice and the September equinox, and in that case we still have a few days before it ends.

But this page was laid out over what is Labor Day weekend in the United States, and in the gringo culture that's when summer traditionally ends. Ask any student at the International School of Panama. (Come to think of it, their summer vacation ended in mid-August.)

From the business perspective of this publication, our summer slow season more or less coincides with that of the North American television industry. Our readership plummets just after Memorial Day and regains its stride after the Labor Day weekend. And so it was this year, although if you want to compare each month of this past summer to the same month in 2003, you could argue that The Panama News readership grew each month. In August we averaged more than 1000 visits per day for the first time in a summer month.

But what we show you in the chart above are real numbers, not comparative percentages, with the figures we consider most important (visits) shown in the yellow bars of the little graph to the upper right. Yes, we know --- the dot-com hustlers of yesteryear liked to talk about hits (the green bars on the bigger graph) because that's a bigger number, and if we wanted to get into pompous hype we'd talk about kilobytes (the red bars at the lower right) because we broke that record in August.

But let us get real. We are coming off our seasonal readership slump (there will be another, shorter one over the Christmas holidays), but we retain a loyal and growing following. More to the point, we are keeping the faith with our advertisers and the general public by periodically publishing the best independently compiled statistics that we have for our readership, something than none of the other Panamanian media do. If you use Google's rankings as a guide to this website's popularity, the only English-language sites about Panama that draw more traffic than we do are those of the Panama Canal Authority, the CIA's country guide and Nancy Hanna's PanamaInfo (which is mainly a collection of web pages for many separate local businesses). As the damage that the dot-com hustlers did to the Internet's reputation fades away because most of those who did it are no longer in business, we are confident in our ability to compete as an advertising medium.

Also in this section:
Business & Economy Briefs
Torrijos adjusts RP approach in US free trade talks
Green Labeling
Our readership statistics

business

Summertime is over...