More than 2.8 billion page views for the Staples World
In last week’s school board story, the Staples-Motley School District mentioned hitting 1 million page views online, so we started looking at how many page views the Staples World gets.
We don’t track what people do with their newspaper at home, but there have been studies that can help us make an estimate. We sell around 1,400 newspapers every week. Studies show that an average newspaper is read by more than one person, some estimates are two to seven people per newspaper. I’ll use the low number of three, making it realistic that 4,200 people look at the newspaper each week.
A page view online is any photo, story or page that a person visits, the equivilant in a newspaper would be any photo, story or page a person looks at. A “page view” would also count anyone looking at it more than once, so we can add a few more to the minimum counts.
We have 10 to 14 pages every week, but for this count let’s go with the average number of 12 pages, to account for people looking at a page more than once. We usually have at least six elements on each page, counting stories, photos and ads. Often it is many more, but for this exercise I will go with a low estimate of eight, allowing for people looking at a photo more than once.
So the number of readers times the number of pages times the number of stories/photos/ads on each page equals 403,200 views per week. We print 52 newspapers each year so that equals 20.97 million “page views” per year.
Our newspaper has been in existence for 135 years, so that extrapolates to 2.83 billion page views in our history, and that is a fairly low estimate. Those billions of views are woven together into a fabric that criss-crosses the people of our community in countless ways throughout our history.
A better experience
For the past 30 years, the tech people have been telling the world that newspapers will no longer be relevant in the future. In reality, studies show that the healthiest communities are still the ones with a strong local newspaper presence.
Social media posts often lack context and are missing pertinent information that is in every newspaper story. Every story we write tells who, what, where and when, with many of them getting into why and how. Newspapers still do the vast majority of original news reporting that social media ends up repackaging for free.
Everything posted on social media is an ad, not news. The posters are trying to promote themselves, their organization or their ideas, with no third party to determine what is real, what is true and what is important. Newspapers still have the overriding goal of only printing facts, with reasoned opinions labeled as opinions.
Social media is not your friend
With recent mergers and acquisitions, the five richest men in the world now control virtually all of our national media and social media. They are using their platforms to manipulate the national conversation, win elections and tell people what they should be thinking. Do you think the world’s richest men care about our community? No, they are doing this to gain power and gain wealth.
This is the system that many people have bought into, despite social media becoming a massive failure in many areas, with as much misinformation as valid information. It has divided people more than it brings them together. Meanwhile they are stealing your data so they can leverage it for themselves. If you play their game, you will not end up winning.
The school district is concentrating their marketing on social media, which they need to do because of all the misinformation that spreads online. But they shouldn’t forget that the traditional newspaper is still more relevant and more important to the community. Other than the calculations made in this story, we are not stealing your data.
