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The Panama News readership figures
Business & Economy Briefs

graphic by Datarealm

We didn't expect to be setting any records...

Between Panamanian Mothers Day (December 8) and the Day of the Martyrs (January 9), people in this country are preoccupied with a string of holidays and consequently spend less time on the Internet. The phenomenon is similar, even though the starting and ending dates differ, with our many readers abroad. So usually the first part of January is slow in terms of our readership figures and this year was no exception.

Nevertheless, The Panama News did break its records for visits in a month and average visits per day, at 54,299 and 1,809 respectively, this past January.

The Panama News is the only online news medium in Panama that regularly releases the download statistics we get from our web server. Some of the news media lie about their readership and occasionally get caught at it. One website's make-believe chart is so ridiculous that it not only projects a smooth, steeply rising curve --- something that the realities of Internet usage make extremely improbable --- but also graphically claims the impossibility of having more unique visitors than visitors.

We have an opaque business culture here, in which admissions of reality are taken as a combination of weakness and foolishness. But The Panama News expects that, whatever hype any competitors disseminate and the ad cartel chooses to buy, the approximate truth of which media reach how many people in which demographic groups will eventually be known and advertisers will learn to discount the hustlers and their bogus claims. In the long run, honesty is the best policy as far as we are concerned.

The charts above and below contain the main data that we get from our web server, Philadelphia-based Datarealm. (Although we have had very occasional glitches with them, by the way, The Panama News is very happy with the services they provide and the way they are candid with us and set things right if there are problems.) All of the download figures we get from Datarealm are available on request.

The big unknown for us, quite candidly speaking, is what percentage of our readers are in Panama. Due to the way the Internet works, the locations from which more than half of the people who visit The Panama News log on are unknown. Our annual reader polls, the sources of our letters to the editor and other factors lead us to guess that about one-third of our readers are located on the isthmus, and the rest are mainly people who have historic ties to Panama.

 Graphic by Datarealm