Thank You For Making Rockville Central Second Most Read Local Blog In Maryland
Nov 19, 2010 8:47 - 4 Comments
The headline of this article says it all.
Once again, Adam Pagnucco at Maryland Politics Watch has released readership data he has compiled on the 46 chief blogs in Maryland. (The full piece is worth reading.) Rockville Central remains number two for local blogs, just behind Howard County blog Tales of Two Cities.
Here’s a graph of the trendline for the top five local blogs:
Rockville Central is the red line in the above graph. (The other blogs in the graph besides the ones already mentioned are: Inside Charm City, Just Up The Pike, and Rethink College Park).
We’re happy to say that our readership growth over the past year (January to October) is a very healthy 19.7%.
Of course, the elephant in the room when it comes to Maryland blogs is Maryland Politics Watch, which is out ahead of all Maryland blogs, with 34,618 visits in October. (By comparison, we had 18,430 visits last month.)
Thank you, Rockville!
What About News Sites?
These numbers make any reasonable person wonder about how they compare to the so called “mainstream news” sites. In Rockville, that would really be the Gazette and the Sentinel. That’s a tough one to figure. Independent blogs like Rockville Central typically share their readership statistics because it is good citizenship to do that (just click on the “our stats” link in the righthand sidebar). “News” sites typically don’t share readership statistics becuase they think it might hurt them competitively.
Thankfully, there is a company called compete.com that figures out the traffic data for many sites on the Interent, especially the major players. Adam recently wrote an article analyzing their traffic figures. What he found is that the major international newspaper sites (like the Washington Post) get lots and lots of traffic: The Post averaged over 22 million site visits from August through October this year. Regional major papers do quite well too: The Washington Times and the Baltimore Sun, for instance, averaged about 3 million visits each during that period.
But below that top tier, there is a big drop off. So how are “our” news sites doing? Here are monthly average site visits from compete.com data:
- Gazette: 196,635 site visits per month
- Sentinel: 5,783 site visits per month
Remember, the Gazette and Sentinel cover all of Montgomery County, not just Rockville.
4 Comments
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RC may be the second most read, but is the first most readable!
Rockville Central is the first blog I found interesting because it deals with Rockville issues and opinions. It is a well managed and interesting blog.
I have been reading Rockville Central from its beginning. However, I can’t read every article. My compliments goes to Cindy and Brad because I understand the amount of time they give to Rockville Central. The statistic of readers certainly includes my many visits.
Ditto for comments 1 and 2.
Thank you so much!