Opinion : Seven Million and still growing: An update and word of thanks from Vinton Today

Sometime today, among the several thousand of times that someone reads a story on Vinton Today, a reader will open an obituary, or look at one of this week’s sports stories, or maybe browse though my silly column about the “Chiropractic Church.”

And when they do, the counter on the front page of this site will change. Six zeroes will replace six nines, and a seven will replace a six.

Seven million.

That’s the number of times people have read a story on Vinton Today.

I told you on June 8, when we reached six million, that we had averaged exactly 8,000 page views per day during the 125 days it took us to go from 5 to 6 million.

We reached 7 million 15 days sooner; it took us 110 days to go from 6 to 7 million. For those of you with calculators, you can figure out that means we have averaged 9,090.09090909….. page views per day between June 8 and today (Sept. 26).

We started this site on March 11, 2010, which if you are counting, you know is 1,297 days ago.

We started counting our total page views in December of 2010, when we passed the 700,000 milestone. At that time we were averaging about 3,000 page views per day, with a high of 6,500. We thought then that those were pretty good numbers.

Now, our overall total average over those 1,297 days is 5,397. Our average over the past three months has been 9,090. At that rate, we would have an annual total of 3,318,181.818181818181818…. per year.

Our web site, as you see, continues to grow. We are adding more readers every day. More than 1,100 people receive our email update every weekday. Another 1,650 follow us on Facebook.

Who we are; who we ain’t

The following information is not at all new to our long-time readers, but there are many people who still do not know exactly who or what Vinton Today is.

We are one of the only – actually I am pretty sure we are the only – online-only newspaper in Iowa.

Yeah, almost every newspaper has some kind of web site that offers (on a variety of terms, from free to subscription-only) the same stories it prints. And there are a few web sites that call themselves local news, but they are regional or national sites like Patch that incorporate a few news stories with a lot of ads. Example: A recent Patch headline announced that a movie was being made in Vinton. It was a misleading ad for a “casting company” that offered – for a hefty price – to help you make your way into show biz.

That’s not us.

We are locally owned and operated. We write the news and take the photos (and share many stories and photos submitted by readers, schools, businesses, organizations and others in the Vinton area). We sell the ads to local businesses, and create them ourselves.

We are not affiliated with any newspaper or publishing entity.

About once a week, someone searches for the traditional newspaper through an Internet search engine.

They find us; we send them to the newspaper.

So, if you read something you don’t like on Vinton Today, don’t blame any newspaper.

At this point I am tempted to brag about how much more news we have on Vinton Today than anyone else. But I will instead say, “Go, look.” Watch news on TV. Read other newspapers. And compare. We have more stories with more detail and we usually have them before anyone else.

There have been several occasions when the TV stations – who do follow us – have read a story on Vinton Today and immediately dispatched camera crews to Vinton. Often when I post something on our web site, I say out loud: "This is going to be on TV tonight."

And it usually is.

Another word of thanks

Every time we pass a milestone, we say thanks to all of those who made this possible. To all of the readers, all of our followers on Facebook, to all of those who send stories or photos or ideas, for the people at Monkeytown who designed the world’s most efficient newspaper web site (our site is incredibly easy to use with very minimal problems which we can easily fix), and of course our advertisers who make it possible for us to make a living doing what we love.

We will keep doing what we have been doing for the past 1,297 days and we are sure you will, as well.