All roads lead to Greene County, or so it seems, and looking at analytics from GreeneCountyNewsOnline’s first year bolsters that notion.
GreeneCountyNewsOnline finished its rookie season Nov. 6. In the first year, a total of 37,026 unique visitors made 112,726 visits to the site and viewed a whopping 431,325 pages! And there was plenty to read on those pages – there were 1,978 articles posted during the year. Some of them, like the police and sheriff’s report, were updated 20 or more times. (The October sheriff’s report, for example, is counted as one post, although it was updated every week day during the month.) There were more than 900 images (pictures, ads, and pdfs of meeting minutes) added just since the Greene County Fair!
Of the thousands of visitors, 68.7 percent are in Iowa. Two-thirds of the Iowans are in Greene County towns, but the remaining third come from 310 different towns in Iowa. Creston gets a GCNO shout-out for being the town not in Greene County from which the most visits come, and that’s been so all year long! Hello, Creston!
Visitors have come from every state in the Union, with Wisconsin in the lead at 7.7 percent and Minnesota at 4 percent. And, to show just how small the world is since the creation of the World Wide Web, there have been visitors from all over the world, from countries only Mrs. Google could place on a map. There are 22 countries where 30 or more visits originated. Germany leads with 641 visits, with the United Kingdom at 246 and Brazil at 203.
Folks in Greene County visit GreeneCountyNewsOnline for….. news! But let’s imagine why the folks who don’t live here visit GCNO. Let’s imagine that they once lived here, that they know and love people here, that they’re thinking of moving here. Let’s think that they enjoy reading about a place where the pace is pleasantly busy but not frantic, where neighbors take time to plan benefits for people who need extra help, where councils and boards do the best job they can with their available resources, where there’s excitement about coming job growth and development, and where the things that connect us all very personally to each other matter, a lot.
(And maybe some of them have come to GCNO’s Good News page because what other “news” source elevates chickens to goddesses of beauty and heralds the triumph of a turtle making his way up Sewer Hill?)
