A Note About FrontBurner Traffic

In the comments to Leading Off this morning, a FrontBurnervian named M Schwartz said that there has been a “significant drop in traffic on FrontBurner” because of the way we moderate comments. FBvians who have been around a while know all about the Time of Darkness a few years back, when Wick shut off comments altogether because they weren’t much fun to read. Traffic did drop then. But the decision to moderate comments — and to do it with a fairly heavy hand, tossing remarks not only because they are vulgar but because, for instance, they don’t use upper-case letters to begin sentences — has proven to be a solid decision.

From August to October last year, FrontBurner averaged about 56,000 unique visitors per month. For the same period this year, we have averaged about 114,000 unique visitors. Now then, owing to the way Google Analytics does its job (and the way we do ours), the number from last year doesn’t account for visits made on a mobile device, which the 2011 number does. A tech genius here (Hi, Randy!) says adding 10,000 unique visitors to last year’s average would be a crazy high number. Let’s do it anyway.

Conservative estimate: traffic is up 70 percent over last year. Lesson to be learned: don’t confuse the number of comments to a post with the number of people who are reading it.

We’re humbled by your patronage.

(Not really.)

North Texans Don’t Read Local News Online

Check out this new study of online consumption of local news by a fellow named Matthew Hindman. He studied 100 metro areas and found that people in Dallas/Fort Worth don’t consume much local news online. For instance, in the top city, Salt Lake City, a typical web user generates 89 pageviews per month of local news. In Oklahoma City (roughly the median), the typical web user generates 12 pageviews per month. In Dallas/Fort Worth? Just 5.5, tied for seventh-least pageviews.

Then there’s the matter of how many local news sites he found in each market, defined as a site that captures at least 1 percent of the market’s web users in a month’s time). He found we only have nine, about the median. By comparison, Indianapolis has 17, and Boston, the top city, has 28.

It would be nice to know which are the nine North Texas sites he measured. All we know is that four are TV sites, four are print, and one is web-only.