Peninsula Daily News began 2011 with a hefty increase in traffic at its website, drawing 792,820 page views and an average audience of 133,056 unique visitors.
This is up from 658,523 page views — a 20.4 percent increase — and 103,571 unique visitors — a 28.5 percent hike — which were recorded in January 2010.
The numbers also showed an increase in total visitors — 275,181 in January, a 25 percent increase from 219,976 in the same month a year earlier.
The PDN’s website, www.peninsuladailynews.com, is far and away the dominant news and information website for the North Olympic Peninsula, according to statistics from Omniture, Quantcast and Google Analytics, which measure Web traffic.
Top stories
The top three news stories viewed at the PDN’s website in January were:
— “Man finds missing van while bird-watching west of Port Angeles” (6,364 page views).
— “Coping with a tragedy: Father tells of son’s suicide in hopes of helping others” (4,157 page views).
— “Port Angeles man who collapsed while restrained by police declared legally dead” (3,753 page views).
Peninsula Daily News finished off 2010 by hitting a new milestone — the newspaper’s 12-year-old website logged a total of 8.66 million page views.
This was up from 6.47 million page views in 2009, an increase of 2.19 million.
New records were also set in 2010 for visits by individual Web users and the number of unique visitors.
A visit is when one person is active on a website.
Unique visitors, in Web jargon, come back again and again for fresh information. Their Internet address is counted only once no matter how many times they visit the site.
The number of page views also demonstrates the volume of traffic a website receives.
The print PDN is also strong, with an audited Monday through Friday circulation of 14,817, with 34,000 daily readers.
Sunday audited circulation was 16,313, with a readership of more than 46,000.
In addition to using independent agencies to measure its Web traffic, the PDN is the only newspaper on the North Olympic Peninsula with its circulation verified by an independent auditor, the national Audit Bureau of Circulations.
