People we talk with are sometimes unaware of the numbers behind this site. In honor of our Token Economy, let me share some recent statistics. As you know, we’re extremely local, and focus on Brattleboro and surrounding areas in southern Vermont. Our audience drifts into NH and Massachusetts as well. We also have people reading and writing who are interested in Brattleboro but live elsewhere. A few of these folks are reporters looking for stories and people to interview.
Let’s look at some numbers.
Windows users account for just about 50% of iBrattleboro visitors. Mac users come in at 25%, Linux at just over 8%.
Google Chrome is the top browser, followed by Firefox and Safari. Most searches are referred from Google, with Yahoo and Bing supplying the bulk of remain search referrals.
Over 200 new members have signed up in the last year. Over 3,200 people have signed up to contribute comments, stories, events, photos, and more since we began in 2003.
We’ve published 5,200 stories, 11,800 comments, and 4,150 events since we did the site update in 2013.
At any given moment of the day, there are usually between 15-45 people here interacting with the site. An ad on the homepage for a month gets seen almost 20,000 times, depending on the news that month.
In November of 2015, there were 21,925 unique visitors who came to the site a total of 57,471 times, looking at 215,107 pages, resulting in 1,184,766 hits total.
The most popular day of thew week on the site is often Monday.
We send out tweets announcing each story submitted to over 1,100 Twitter followers, boosting any story you submit. (You can follow iBrattleboro on twitter.)
After US visitors, we see a fair amount of traffic from Germany, Romania, China, Great Britain and Canada. People from over 130 countries stopped by, including visitors from Mongolia, Ghana, Lesotho, and Tadjikistan.
The outside world continues to be interested in Brattleboro’s experiment. In the last month, we’ve been contacted by a Ukrainian foundation working to encourage community journalism and a person in Queensland, Australia looking for advice on setting up a similar project down under.
The site continues to evolve over time. Some of our more prolific contributors have moved away, or passed away, leaving ample room for new users to make note of things going on in the neighborhood, the town, your organizations and workplace, and the world about us.
The wild west atmosphere of the earliest years has faded away, being replaced with rather civilized interaction.
Your contributions of stories, events, and comments continue to make the site worthwhile and interesting (or not). Your ability to read and write qualifies you to participate. We provide the platform and supply you with a loyal, local audience. We have no paid staff, nor editors.
You have permission to be provocative or boring. Write about what you know, meetings you attend, events you enjoyed, or ideas you have. Ask questions. Help people with answers. Interview someone. Share a photo.
If something is missing from iBrattleboro, fill it in. If something needs explaining, explain it.
We’ve got some upgrades and improvements planned for the near future (and have at long last recovered our former Brain Trust text and images from an unwieldy wiki format), so stay tuned.
Continued Interest In Citizen Journalism
Since we started iBrattleboro in 2003, lots of people have taken an interest in our experiment in hyperlocal citizen journalism. After a while, we figured people would stop asking about it but that hasn’t happened. We still get calls for interviews and advice — and as Chris mentioned, in places as far away as Australia. I’m glad that there are people in the world who still think that it’s a good idea to share ideas with your neighbors, wherever they may be.
Thanks to all the users of iBrattleboro for giving the world an ongoing example of what citizen journalism can be!