This Is One Busy Site!

Maybe it’s not polite to brag, but we can’t help ourselves.

At the Hayride, our internal stats program says we did 520,000 page views for the month of January. But we didn’t say a whole lot about that at the end of January, because we wanted to wait until we could get a gauge on how that stacks up with other sites around Louisiana.

Well, today we went over to Compete.com and plugged ourselves in against some of the larger media outlets in the state, and we were shocked at the results. Turns out that while the December numbers showed we ranked 14th if you put us up against the websites of the state’s major newspapers, based on Compete.com’s January traffic audit we’re a bit bigger wheel than that.

Here’s how the state’s media sites rank based on Compete’s January numbers of unique visitors…

  1. nola.com 989,699
  2. 2theadvocate.com 348,183
  3. wwltv.com 226,975
  4. wafb.com 165,242
  5. shreveporttimes.com 141,994
  6. ktbs.com 126,634
  7. thehayride.com 125,301
  8. houmatoday.com 122,349
  9. katc.com 120,453
  10. wdsu.com 116,830
  11. thenewsstar.com 87,211
  12. theadvertiser.com 85,147
  13. thetowntalk.com 84,616
  14. neworleans.com 77,588
  15. wbrz.com 76,152
  16. wwl.com 69,454
  17. dailycomet.com 56,008
  18. klfy.com 52,307
  19. fox8live.com 51,702
  20. bestofneworleans.com 41,734
  21. americanpress.com 29,984
  22. dailyworld.com 28,110
  23. iberianet.com 27,131
  24. leesvilledailyleader.com 20,738
  25. businessreport.com 20,635

As you might imagine, we’re pretty happy about all this. It’s clear we’re doing something right, and we can’t thank our readers enough for your support and contributions.

Of course, there are some bigger lessons to be had here about the changing nature of American media. This is as shoestring an operation as you can get, and we’re picking up more traffic – considerably more – than some operations run by fairly large, established and well-heeled companies. Tells you how important the internet has become as a medium for dissemination of information, and it also tells you how democratic the marketplace of ideas has become. If you’ve got something to say and you’re willing to work to get that something out, you can accomplish it.

Of course, we’ll be hard-pressed to top our January numbers this month what with the changeover to the new site; we lost a good bit of traffic in the week or so we were making the switch and it’s only now starting to come back. We expect we’ll surpass January’s numbers in a couple of months. The point is, though, you can attract over 100,000 visitors to your site in a month on not a lot more than sweat equity. Making that traffic pay in dead presidents comes a little later, but it’s all part of the growing process.

And that’s a bit of the American Dream come to life, isn’t it?

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