From the minute we first talked with some of our longtime advertisers about taking Carolina Arts totally online, the question asked was – “How will I know how many people see my ad?”
An important question for all advertisers, but one hard to answer for any media outlets.
A few days ago I went to our internet server’s page that tracks statistics and found out some of the info people are wanting to know.
As of Jan. 10th, 3,880 visitors had downloaded the PDF of the entire paper – all 49 pages. We don’t know if they looked at all 49 pages, but we started getting positive e-mails about the new look of the paper by the afternoon of Jan. 1. But, once you download the paper to your computer you can look at it whenever you want – as often as you want.
Now, we have no way of telling how many people just looked at the whole paper on their browsers – our server can’t track that. Some people don’t like downloading anything. Our overall visitations to the website are holding at an average of more than 50,000 a month. Considering the holiday and the weather – that’s good.
Actually the download is just over 10mb which is smaller than some images people e-mail to us. And the download takes less than 2 minutes – sometimes less than a minute on our computers and they’re not so new. But the older your computer or browser is – it could take longer.
Now, we posted individual pages for those who don’t like to download files and we could see those numbers in the hundreds. Some pages attracted more viewers than others – those were pages with colorful ads and color images.
Carolina Arts – the website got over 20,000 visitors in that same timeframe and they looked at 10,000 different pages – some going as far back as 1999. Usually what happens in a search, a viewer finds one link to our paper and then ends up going to different places in time in our archives which date back to 1999. Regular views go straight to where they have bookmarked a page. So ten years from now people will still be looking at pages in this Jan. 2011 issue and downloading the entire PDF for a walk back in time to see what was going on in the Carolina visual art community. It’s amazing.
But our advertisers are more concerned with the present time.
If you haven’t seen our Jan. 2011 issue of Carolina Arts(www.carolinaarts.com) – what are you waiting for?
While you’re viewing that issue, we also ask you to click on some of our advertisers’ ads and go check out what they have to offer. After all, they make the paper possible. They need to know you appreciate their support.