economy

There are all manner of claims made about how many people read which publications, including some cross their hearts and swear on the Bible boasts by people who elsewhere in their publications unwittingly admit to deceiving their readers and advertisers. (Tens of thousands of readers, and yet a counter that only shows a few hundred clicks per article? Another attack screed that claims that ads were put up that were not paid for, to make it appear that there were more paying advertisers? Right --- just what you'd expect.)

The Panama News from time to time publishes its raw download statistics as we get them from our web server. It's a matter of ethics, of business transparency.

There are a lot of numbers that we wish we had. For example, virtually all Panamanian Internet service providers arrange things so that download statistic compiling machines register most downloads coming from Panama as connections with computers whose locations are "unknown."

The changes that The Panama News has been undergoing affect some of the numbers above. But the numbers under the orange box, "sites," is roughly the number of readers we have in a month. It actually measures the number of different computers that connect with the website, but of course in some households we have multiple readers using the same computer, while other readers catch us on multiple computers, for example at Internet cafes in Panama.

So in October, some 58,796 people --- a little more or a little less --- clicked onto The Panama News website.

More than two million "hits" in October? That's nice, it's a record for us, and maybe it's important for those who want to use it to roughly calculate how many people saw their ads, but the "sites" number is more important. That we are having about the same number of readers making fewer visits is largely a function of The Panama News email list, as hundreds of readers are now waiting for notices for what's uploaded rather than constantly looking at the website.