A Seattle Post-Intelligencer writer with a strong interest in finding a buyer for his newspaper sends over some noteworthy stats. One could definitely read them as an enticement for some wealthy civic do-gooder to step up and purchase the P-I from Hearst. But I also read these stats as one more piece of evidence suggesting that Hearst would be a little crazy not to make a run at some sort of web-only P-I after the print edition’s likely demise in early March. (And, I further read this e-mail as a reminder of the dizzying number of blogs the P-I has thrown at the wall lately—with some, obviously, sticking.)

But enough of that. Let’s do the numbers:

From: Smith, Don

Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 6:05 PM

To: XXXX

Subject: January Traffic sets P-I record!

P-I staff blogs posted a record 2.8 million page views in January, with two blogs over a half-million page views for the first time ever and nine staff blogs were over 100,000 page views — also a first!

Leading all blogs — with about a quarter of that traffic — was Joe Tartakoff and the Microsoft blog. With 774,153 page views, the Microsoft blog eclipsed the previous record for any P-I blog that had been held by his predecessor, Todd Bishop. But Todd’s high, 764,388 page views in June 2008, came mostly on the strength of a single post which had external links. That post, about a Bill Gates e-mail, got 472,405 page views and was one of two posts that got over 20,000 page views that month. Joe’s record-setting pace, by contrast, included not a single post with more than 50,000 page views, but 11 posts that got more than 20,000. That’s a strong, steady readership.

The Seattle 911 blog, with Casey McNerthney and the breaking news crew, topped a half-million page views for the second time in its brief eight-month history. Again, that’s a strong, steady audience. The Big Blog drew 210,712, Huskies Football got 171,873, Aerospace was 140,242, Football 112,784 and Seattle Politics 110,657 — all in familiar six-digit territory showing loyal, steady followings.

New to the 100,000-plus circle this month were Devouring sEATtle, at 112,186 and Seattle Sports (Royal Brougham’s Baby), which drew 100,922 page views in its first month.

All of that, and much more, led to record traffic, up more than a third over a month ago and 115 percent ahead of a year ago.

Thanks for all that work! (Complete stats for January Staff blogs are attached).

Don Smith

UPDATE: And hey, since we’re showing you theirs, we’ll show you ours too. For the month of January Slog had 1.58 million page views—less than the total page views for all the P-I blogs added together, but far more than any individual P-I blog.

Eli Sanders was The Stranger's associate editor. His book, "While the City Slept," was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He once did this and once won...

18 replies on “As the Print P-I Faces Closure, Record Web Traffic for the Online Edition”

  2. Of course the PI’s web traffic is up. They’re about to shut down their print edition, which has put them in the limelight since the announcement. Please are heading to the website to see what’s going on.

    And, of course the Microsoft blog got record traffic. Msoft just announced it’s first ever mass layoffs, again, driving traffic to Msoft blogs to see what’s going on.

    This is no different than everybody suddenly buying print editions the day after Obama’s nomination, etc. It is not evidence of either a print or online turnaround, just a normal cycle of traffic based on what is currently hot news.

    Yawn.

  3. Do they share the pageviews for the actual paper? Is most of the online value of the P-I (or the Stranger, for that matter) in a few high-traffic blogs?

  5. the question for all of these stats is how they’re measured. Are they from a reputable 3rd party service such as Google Analytics, or are they internally measured from robot-filled server logs. Inquiring minds want to know…

  9. If you want more pageviews just shorten the Slog page, seriously you have to scroll through dozens of screens to get to the “older entries” link, but that’s only counted as one pageview.

    Web analytics can be tweaked with just some small changes and newspapers tend to generate a lot of pageviews by their structure.

    Front page (pv) – click on story (pv) – back to front page (pv) – click on another story (pv)….and so on.

  10. In the bad old days people used to talk about “hits”, calls to the web server. But it was silly because you could take a page, break it up into different elements, and increase your “hits” by 10x or 20x with the exact same traffic.

    How many unique users do you have, that’s a lot more telling (although again, highly inaccurate because of cookie deletion and so on).

  11. Uh, am I the only one to notice their site has been glitchy as all fuck for the last month? Maybe the record is all the impatient people triple clicking to get to the articles.

    PS- (and SLOG writers might want to take note here) page views are ephemeral- without quality content “same store sales” will decline.

    Lot’s of people apparently clicked lots of PI posts but that doesn’t mean they will come back. Lot’s of people look at car wrecks but most won’t pay to be in one!

  16. Google Analytics and most of the web analytics tools out there today use javascript, and spiders and bots don’t typically run it.

    So no, Googlebot traffic won’t count in your numbers.

  18. How much of the increase in pageviews is due to a larger number of people out of work?? If you’re not working, you have more time to peruse articles online.

    I’ve seen the same radical increase of traffic on Twitter, too.

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