NewCanaanite.com Cracks 100,000 Pageviews in October

NewCanaanite.com broke the 100,000 pageview mark for the first time ever for a single month, reaching 104,594 for the month of October.

Terry (L) and Michael Dinan, 1975.

We’re proud of this milestone, an accomplishment we share with our wonderful advertising partners and regular readers. I purchased the domain newcanaanite.com very tentatively for $10, two days after Patch let me go when that company was sold in January 2014. It was my brother Terry’s idea, and with his help and encouragement—and his early-morning romps from Parade Hill Road to Elm Street in the snow to get storm photos all that February and March last year—we grew the site’s traffic quickly enough to start building a business.

Traffic growth chart (from Google Analytics):

Our daily newsletter—you can sign up here if you have not already, it’s free and we never spam you—has become a major traffic driver for us. It now includes 820 daily readers and the open- and click-thru rates on it have continued to rise as more people have subscribed. Here is a snapshot from today from Mailchimp, the service we use to get it out, which shows our open and click-thru rates against industry averages:

Open Rate

Click-Thru Rate

It’s been our pleasure to launch the site with wide community support and to share milestones with our readers—we earned eight “Excellence in Journalism” awards for work done in 2014 by the CT Society of Professional Journalists, hit 1 million pageviews in August, then I was able to go on vacation that same month, and here I am now writing this from our own office right on Elm Street (please feel free to drop by and say ‘Hello,’ it’s number 140 Elm). We’ve been interviewed many times about how this all came together and other topics.

We feel more strongly than ever about our coverage plan, focusing on quality-of-life matters for local people, and the way we run NewCanaanite.com—for example, disallowing anonymous comments from aliases and always ensuring that we know who is commenting, even if they choose to use just part of their real names.

In truth, we have had 30-day periods in the past where NewCanaanite.com has exceeded 100,000 pageviews—those periods did not line up with an actual calendar month until now. In October, our most-read articles have included four that deal with the proposed Saxe Middle School renovation (read our full coverage here), and an article celebrating one young man’s unflagging commitment to his sport and team at New Canaan High School.

If you have stories you’d like to share with fellow New Canaanites, please consider giving me a heads-up at editor@newcanaanite.com, and plan to attend our next Community Coffee—let us know a day and time that works for you, as we seek to establish it as a regular monthly meeting.

Thank you for reading the New Canaanite.