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business & economy

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The Panama News readership numbers
Business & Economy briefs
 

graphic by Datatrealm

Despite everything, we broke readership records in November

The Panama News is unusual among Panamanian media in that we publish our readership statistics. Some of the others that do publish their numbers have been caught lying about it, as it's not a crime here. We think that we owe it to our advertisers in particular to be transparent about our download statistics. We will provide all the data we have to anyone who requests it, and have done so even to competitors. It runs against the secretive national business culture, but we have faith that eventually businesses will turn against all the creepy little games that the mainsteam media and advertising agencies play and seek the most publicity for they money among the groups they want to reach, and realize that for many businesses it's very worthwhile to reach the people who read The Panama News.

November was a disastrous month from the production point of view, but we broke a lot of our records. Understand, however, that the kilobytes are up in part because people are using the Internet radio link buttons on the bottom of the front page and the top of the news pages and listening to the radio while they read and thus staying connected to The Panama News for longer. Adding these 21 new buttons a few issues ago also pretty automatically drove our hits up.

We didn't break the records in the very important categories of unique sites and page views, but we're still doing pretty well. Pressing on the quarter-million hits and 54,000 visits barriers is an indication that, even with competition from various sources, The Panama News holds its own as a popular source of information about happenings on the isthmus.

Usually readership dips in December, much as it does with television, because people are busy with holidays and sit in front of video screens a bit less. Then our readership tends to bounce back up after the holidays.

Below we show the chart for our last 12 months' monthly and daily average performances. Note that the trends have their similarities to North American television, and we think that it's not just because many of our readers are US residents who have historical ties to Panama --- Panamanians living abroad, people who were stationed here with the military, Zonians, West Indians who emigrated and so on.

So where do we go from here? It has been a dream deferred for nearly five years now, but the hope is back into print publication. That will require a bit more economic growth and some business alliances, but the goal no longer seems as utopian as it did just a few years ago.

But you know what? The Panama News has more readers now than it ever did when we were publishing in tabloid format. When we go back into print it will be a great step for the business, but we will nevertheless remain a primarily online publication. Why? For one thing, consider how many pages it would take to put the content in this and recent Internet issues onto tabloid pages. There is just more space to report the news, discuss interesting issues and entertain the readers out there in cyberspace.

One final but very important thing: thank you for reading The Panama News, and a special thanks to those who contributed to us during our October fundraising drive and particularly all of the advertisers who make The Panama News possible.