August is generally a slow month for news, but ARLnow saw the highest readership since the height of the pandemic.
The site recorded 1,542,873 pageviews for the month of August, according to Google Analytics. That’s the highest readership in three years, following a massive readership spike in the first half of 2020. Our all-time record remains 2.5 million monthly views at the beginning of the pandemic.
At least for now, ARLnow has weathered the storm caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and we’ve done it with your help.
Back in March and April, things were looking bleak. For a time, advertising sales were down over 40% and new sales had nearly stopped. We were staring into a void of financial losses and a worsening economic picture. But then things started going right.
Last month, ARLnow set a new all-time readership record: 1.45 million pageviews. In the nine days since the first coronavirus case was reported in Arlington, we have blown that away, setting fresh records every night.
For the past 30 days, we’ve served 600,000 readers and just under 2 million pageviews.
Maybe it’s the lousy weather keeping everyone glued to their phones and computers. Maybe it’s people tiring of the endless stream of national political news. Or maybe there’s just been a lot going on locally.
Whatever the explanation, ARLnow has officially set a new 30-day web traffic record.
ARLnow.com has set a new 30-day readership record.
From June 25-July 24, more than 400,000 unique users visited the local news site, viewing 1.41 million pages, according to Google Analytics. The average unique user, as measured by Google Analytics, read 3.5 pages during the month, though those returning 15 or more times throughout the month accounted for more than half of ARLnow’s pageviews.
In June, ARLnow.com was read by about 350,000 unique visitors who accounted for 1.43 million pageviews, a new record for the site.
Across our network of four sites — ARLnow.com, Reston Now, Hill Now and Borderstan — we saw a record 527,000 unique visitors and 1.92 million pageviews. In all, our sites have 94,953 subscribers/followers across email, Twitter and Facebook.
For the 30-day period ending March 24, LNN’s four sites — ARLnow.com, Reston Now, Hill Now and Borderstan — were visited by 435,000 unique visitors, according to Google Analytics. The sites collectively served 1.75 million page views during that time.
That’s a new record for LNN, which last year re-launched Borderstan, a D.C. neighborhood blog founded in 2008 and acquired from its original founders, while at the same time selling its Bethesda Now website to Bethesda Magazine. The record readership was driven by local stories — unlike past readership records, this time there was no spike in traffic from a story that received national attention.
