business & economy

Also in this section:
Odebrecht gets Brazilian government backing for work in Panama
Recognizing an attack
The Panama News readership figures
Panama's bond rating still below investment grade
Globalization in the labor movement
Business & Economy Briefs

A good month of October for The Panama News

download figures and chart from Datarealm

By comparison, it may have been easy to expect. September was a fundraising month and the electronic attacks were more severe than usual, with hackers actually getting into the website on three occasions. But October was a big news month, with the canal expansion referendum on the 22nd. One would expect that our September readership figures would be somewhat reduced and in October we would draw more readers, and that's the way it was.

However, early November numbers show that The Panama News readership continues to climb. Moreover, the addition of the Wappin' radio show to the website is putting us on a course to use about two-thirds of the bandwidth that we get from our web server, which probably means that we will sooner rather than later get a new server for that part of the website so that our new audio function can grow without crashing the whole website.

The dark green bar, for hits, represents a larger number which dot-com hustlers tried to popularize because naive potential advertisers often confuse it with the number of readers an online publication has. Well, we did break our hits record, for what that's worth, in October. Of more significance is the orange bar, for "unique sites." This is the number that is more or less the number of readers we have, as determined by the number of different computers logging onto this website. (Because some readers may use Internet cafes and thus more than one computer, while other computers may be used by more than one reader, and still others can effectively mask the site from which they are logging on, "sites" does not exactly equal "readers.") Roughly speaking, however, The Panama News is closing in on 50,000 readers per month, a figure that we expect to soon surpass.

The Panama News readership over the past year