business & economy

More than 50,000 readers in October

Yes, there are some imponderables, and some obvious things. Stop putting in the pages that say "under construction, come back here in a bit" and you register fewer page views and, to the extent that people come back to see if that particular page is up, fewer visits as well. Have more photographs in an issue and you register more kilobytes and more hits. The extra day in a 31-day month raises your totals for traffic in that month.

The main thing, though, is the "sites" column on the chart below --- "unique sites" connecting to The Panama News website. It's the closest actual estimate to how many readers we have. Some computers or Internet service providers block information, which artificially lowers the sites number. On some computers, more than one person reads The Panama News, which also gives us a lower sites number than the number of actual readers. Some people read The Panama News in more than one sitting from more than one Internet connection --- people who read it in Panama's Internet cafes would tend to be one category of these. That artificially inflates the sites number, to the extent that one would equate "sites" with "readers."

The numbers we provide you are are our web server's download statistics and there are details we'd like do get but don't and for the reasons stated above the figures are never absolutely precise --- but they're fairly good barometers, and encouraging for The Panama News to see. More than 50,000 people read The Panama News last month. Our web server's download logs registered 51,158 sites, and with the caveats that have been mentioned, that's about the number of readers we had.

Month
	Sites	KBytes	Visits	Pages	Files	Hits
Oct 2007	51158	31703483	105126	285600	1300463	1785239
Sep 2007	48599	25512520	106837	278120	1190783	1688618

Were The Panama News a dot-com hustler operation, we'd play up the 1.78 million hits and talk about them as if that was the number of our readers, or the 31.7 million kilobytes, because that's an even larger number. 

But even if The Panama News is a ragtag micro-enterprise, it's also a publication that maintains some standards. That's why we have so many readers --- more, in fact, than some of Panama's Spanish-language mainstream newspapers.

Even though we are in a country where it's legal for newspapers to lie about their circulations, where the audience figures given by the TV stations are grade B fiction and the ad cartel makes its decisions based upon who's related to whom rather than on how to get a client's message out to a target audience, we make periodic disclosures of our download statistics. It's not only the ethical thing to do, we think it's also good business in the long run. 

The ad cartel is not going to have its founder's son-in-law as president and spending $71,000 per day in public funds to hype his image forever. And even while that goes on, there are actually business people who are more serious about getting their message out to where folks they want to reach will see it at a reasonable price than they are about playing all the foolish and expensive games that all the slick operators would like them to play.