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business & economy

Also in this section:
Mutiny on the Internet
Panama - Costa Rica power interconnection progresses
The Panama News readership figures
Business & Economy Briefs
 

Smashing most of our records

graphic from Datarealm

October was one for the record books --- but maybe with an asterisk here or there. We broke the 50,000 visits in a month barrier for the first time, but from slightly fewer unique sites than in September. Some of that has to be attributable to production delays that had the regular readers coming back several times to see if the briefs were done.

Hits are, of course, the large number with which dot-com hustlers try to impress the gullible. We shattered the previous hits record. But understand that when you open a page, every graphic on it counts as a hit. So of course, adding the array of 15 music buttons at the bottom of our front page drove hits right up.

(It seems, however, that it drove our Google rating down. Google is feuding with Yahoo, and the downgrade appears to be punishment for including the Yahoo music links on the front page. But The Panama News is not designed to please Google, but to serve its readers. Those Internet radio links are there so that people can listen to music they'll like while reading The Panama News. The Yahoo links are there on their merits --- for one thing, the editor was a teenager in the Detroit area and has this appreciation for soul music, which among its diverse genres Yahoo covers better than others.)

The Panama News is growing by many measures, and we don't have to play games or insult the readers' intelligence to do so. Quite to the contrary --- a publication that attracts visits on false pretenses, or that spews self-serving nonsense, will sooner or later be exposed for what it is. So we don't have sexually suggestive meta-tags to fool voyeurs into clicking us in vain search for pornography, and we don't misrepresent the meaning of our statistics in hopes of making sales to fools.

We do, however, periodically publish our readership figures and we make all of our download data available to those who ask. Transparency is a radical idea in the Panamanian media culture, but something that advertisers deserve.