Well, the numbers for the month of June turned out to surprise me in a good way. We did very well. The final total of downloads for June came in at 50,041. Compared to the 61,199 we saw in May, it might seem down, but it’s the second highest month in the last six months.
For Summer – I think it’s great and it gives me hope for July, but I expect the numbers will fall, but I also could be surprised. A big factor in July will be the big holiday weekend coming at the same time we are launching a new issue. The early numbers could be bad. But, I just don’t know. I have no experience on this yet and comparing these days to the last 23 years is like comparing grapes and water mellons.
Editor’s Note: Early July number were bad. It’s hard to compete with a long holiday weekend like the 4th and many people’s kick off of Summer vacations. Hopefully folks will re-discover our launch e-mail for the July issue – when they get back.
The overall website did well too. We had 69,680 sessions, more than we had in May, and 629,551 hits, which was about 10,000 less than May, but the paper was also 10 pages shorter.
Now, for the strange part of the stats.
Our old “friend” the (other) category, an unknown factor was back strong after a slight retreat in May with a number of 67,189. It was the top factor on our website, but is a meaningless figure as our server can’t explain – who or what these numbers mean. I think they are just there to bug me.
Our ever-popular March 2011 issue attracted another 11, 534 downloads in June. That now amounts to 77,736 downloads of that issue since its launch on March 1st. Why this issue is attracting over 10,000 downloads a month is a real puzzle to me, but it keeps life interesting.
As I stated in the first ten day report done earlier this month I had through that since the May issue was so popular it would over take the March issue in June with repeat downloads, but that didn’t happen. In fact, the May issue just disappeared. I mean it just dropped off the radar in that I can’t find any record of the May or April issue being downloaded in June. And, I went through 5000 stats of a list of 10,001 offered. At the 5000 mark it was down to pages that attracted only 20 views. At that point I lost interest.
That’s pretty strange considering there was a lot of info in that May issue about exhibits which continued into June and July, but would not be mentioned in June again. And, if so many people were interested in an issue (March) which was four months old – why wasn’t anyone interested in looking at May again? We’ll see what happens in July.
Our total number of downloads of issues of Carolina Arts since Jan. 1 is 216,499, an average of 36,083 a month. Not bad for a paper which used to print only 10,000 copies a month. We now have a lot of new readers.