One of the things that most drives advertisers crazy about the internet is the numbers game. Various sites seeking to sell ads claim they are getting a gazillion “hits,” or millions of “page views,” or tens of thousands of “unique visitors.”
In the five years since we have been publishing VeroNews.com, the leading up-to-the-minute source of news about Indian River County, we have declined to play this numbers game – of which the number of “hits” is far and away the most misleading – and have made little effort to sell online advertising.
Why frustrate advertisers, we thought. They know what they are getting with a print ad in Vero Beach 32963. Why get them confused about the cost-effectiveness of online advertising?
As a result, the only companies currently advertising on VeroNews.com are those that twisted our arms and forced us to sell them spots on the home page.
In all these cases, we underpromised, greatly undercharged, and wildly overdelivered.
That is not the case with most other local websites that sell advertising.
So now that Scripps has gone to a paywall that has dramatically reduced the number of visitors to its TCPalm.com, and various blogs are tossing around figures that may sound good to trusting advertisers but really aren’t, it may be time for us to set the record straight.
A year-old Vero blog, for example, is boasting that 7,761 “unique visitors” came to its website during the month of January.
Is that something to brag about?
Well, when you divide that number by 31, you come up with the daily average – 250.
Doesn’t sound quite so exciting, does it?
By comparison, during January, 55,407 unique visitors – about 40 percent of the population of Indian River County – visited VeroNews.com.
We had days in January when the site had more than 3,000 unique visitors. And these visitors returned during the month to read more stories an additional 72,341 times.
On three separate days in January, the number of total visitors to VeroNews.com topped the entire monthly total of any local blog!
What this says to us is that just as we hoped when we launched VeroNews.com five years ago, our site has emerged as the leading online daily news and information resource for Indian River County – with far more readers than any blog and more Indian River County readers than TCPalm.com.
We continue to think that local advertisers are best served by our two print newspapers, Vero Beach 32963 and Sebastian River News, which together are now delivered to the mailboxes of 25,000 upscale Indian River County homes each week.
But if you want to add online advertising to your mix, don’t be fooled by those tossing around numbers that simply don’t add up.
Call our online advertising manager, Judy Davis, at 633-1115. Let her tell you about VeroNews.com, and how it stacks up with other options. Let Judy help you beat the numbers game.
