business & economy

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Panama Canal expansion project selectively hyped
Intellectual property rights and public health
The Panama News readership figures
Teachers in search of jobs
Business & Economy Briefs

graphic by Datarealm

Taking The Panama News readership to another level

In March The Panama News shattered all of its previous readership records. We have never grown so much in one month, or even come close. It's hard to say precisely why our readership jumped when it did, but one clue may be that the US State Department report on human rights in Panama that appeared in the last issue and the other US report on money laundering and financial crimes in this country that appeared in the issue before that were more popular than anything but the front pages.

So what will April and May bring? We may or may not break March's records this month or next, and we expect the normal seasonal dip in readership in June, July and August. But from the figures we're getting in the first days of April, it does seem that a lot of the new people whom The Panama News has attracted will be regular readers.

What's the big imponderable? Our "unique visitor" figures. The orange bars on the upper right-hand graphic, which represent "unique sites," are only part of this number. That's because our web server is unable to determine from whence slightly more than half of our readers log on. A lot of Internet service providers block this information, and because of this country's traditional and mostly praiseworthy attitudes about privacy, that includes almost all providers in Panama. Some readers who are concerned about their privacy also manage to block this information via their computer settings or other means.

(Privacy, by the way, is a concern we share. Countless times The Panama News has been advised that the way out of our chronic financial problems is to capture the email addresses of as many of our readers as we can and sell the resulting list to spammers. No way! Our aim is to provide a public service, not to create a public nuisance. We don't collect information about our individual readers, let alone divulge it to anyone.)

Anyway, the "missing" data mean that we know for sure that in March we had people clicking onto this website from at least 45,787 different computers, but we don't know how many more than that and we don't have a particularly accurate estimate of our readership within Panama. From our occasional reader response (and therefore non-random) surveys and the letters we get, it would seem that most of our readers are outside of Panama but have either lived here before, are thinking about moving here, or both. The most unfortunate part of the situation for us is that the marketing information that can be derived from our download logs is not nearly so precise as many advertisers would like it to be.

That said, we are a Panamanian news medium, operating in a culture with no Nielsen or Arbitron ratings, where the most "respectable" daily newspapers occasionally get caught inflating their readership figures and where an ad cartel puts family ties and kickback schemes way ahead of purchasing decisions that make sense for their clients. We try to light a candle in this darkness, by periodically publishing our readership figures.

Our basic readership trends are shown in numerical form below. If you want more detailed information, ask for it. We are willing to share all the download statistics we have, especially with present and potential advertisers but also with people who are curious for other reasons.