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I've been online manager of The Times for more than 20 years. You would think in that amount of time I would have psychic knowledge of what people want to read online and why they want to read it. I don't.
I am pretty good at coming to conclusions as to what the typical reader does with the typical story on a typical day.
For instance, our readers love to look at obituaries online. The most local of local news, obits are viewed hundreds of thousands of times per month. There are individual obituaries on our site that have been viewed more than 10,000 times.
Readers also love to read crime stories. When you look at the top five stories each month, most, if not all of them are normally, to put it bluntly, about bad people doing bad things. These stories and the ones about other stories affecting the lives of people in the Mid-Ohio Valley make up the bulk of the top traffic on the site.
We, like most sites in America, use Google Analytics to measure the traffic to our site. The internet, unlike any other media, produces the most complete picture possible of its users. Book, magazine and newspaper publishers can tell how many issues they sell, but they can't tell what articles were read. Web publishers can tell exactly what articles were read, how long it took to read them, what device people were using to read it on, where the person was when they read it and how they found the article in the first place. They can also tell what kind of coffee you were drinking when you read it.
Just kidding on the last part, but the rest is all true. We can't tell who you are, or what your address is, but we have a lot of details about the collective audience.
Information can be viewed both in real time and historically. For instance, as I write this, 123 people have viewed the site in the last 30 minutes. 65.2% were on mobile phones, 24.7% were on desktop computers and 3.2% were on tablets. Normally the desktop is higher, but I am writing this toward the end of the workday and people are likely on their phones while they wait until it is time to walk out the door at work. We can also tell the stories they are reading. When we send out a breaking news e-mail, we can see the traffic on that story tick up shortly after the thousands of emails get received.
The analytics will also look at traffic over long periods of time. Days, months, even years can be examined. I looked back over the last five years to see what "earth-shattering" stories readers looked at.
The top story, viewed 154,309 times, was one about a woman that refused to wear a mask at an eighth-grade football game and was tased by a police officer. That is more than 10 times the total population of Marietta. Most of the traffic happened on the day (Sept. 25, 2020) that it was posted. Unlike most stories viewed online, those were not local readers. There are simply not enough people here to make numbers so high. Traffic like that comes from people sharing the link, posting it on other sites and finding it by searching for keywords. The story made national news, which likely made people Google it.
The next most read story had more than 95,000 views. A sports story about the high school football playoffs being expanded in Ohio was much more popular than any game story published during the same period.
A very recent story also makes the five-year list. A pre-election story about local dispensaries preparing for the passage of Issue 2 had 78,926 reads on the website. That is a remarkable number of people interested in the legal sale of marijuana.
A story about a rifle made by Lowell resident Cecil Brooks being up for auction had more than 57,000 views. I photographed Cecil once in his shop. I left in awe of his ability to craft museum-caliber rifles out of raw metal and wood. Brooks' traffic was a result of the skills that he had when he was alive, and likely a few links on high traffic websites devoted to guns.
A few columns that ran on the religion page have had a lot of traffic over a long period of time. "Four trees of the bible" has been viewed 16,197 times, "Seven I ams outline in the bible" has been viewed 20,237 times, most driven by search engines I assume.
How many pages have been viewed on MariettaTimes.com in the last five years? That would be 39,225,120. Did you read on Facebook that no one reads newspapers anymore? Well, that would be FAKE NEWS. Thank you for reading The Times, both in print and online. We are your community newspaper and have been for a long time.