America's Daily Planet Newspaper

So with the politics heating up in Greensboro, we thought we'd blackmail the whole damn election by selling one of our ad-spots on the website to the local candidate with the highest bid. The sooner someone buys the spot the more ads they'll get. Then when it's out-bid, I'll replace their ad with the other party's. In case, none of this works, I will be running ads for Jack Murphy the 107.5 DJ who makes me laugh. Technically I don't even know if he qualifies to be mayor, but I'm convinced we can overcome this obstacle by everyone writing in Jack Murphy for Mayor of Greensboro.

So till the spot is sold capitalist style, I officially endorse Jack Murphy for Mayor. The ad will run on the bottom of every page till election day...

Till then, I promised Matt Hill I'd link to his Totally Fabulous Guide to Greensboro Politics.

Um, who?

Pppffffftttthhhh.... I could beat him.

Yeah... but... you don't have a radio station morning show.

But Ive captured the hearts and minds of millions. LMAO!

Do you think Greensboro would hire a un-godly person like yourself?

Touche!

It will be interesting if the black lady who is running can win, and she's unopposed as of now... well except for Murph's write in campaign.

What if I told you that Jack went to my church? Would you still vote for him?

BecauseHeLives wrote:What if I told you that Jack went to my church? Would you still vote for him?

As long as he isn't as insane as you sir!

Sanjuro wrote:

BecauseHeLives wrote:What if I told you that Jack went to my church? Would you still vote for him?

As long as he isn't as insane as you sir!

That just gave me warm fuzzies all over...

I love Jack... I used to go to Ragsdale my Senior year in High School and I hung out in his hood alot. He's a funny guy, and like alot of fatherly figures, he's pig headed, stubborn, etc.... but I think he'd do a great job for the city. Seriously.

I mean, I love Holliday... he's liberal... but we need a motivator, a prominent voice... I think Jack Murphy could do that...

As for the church thing... I used to go to one, so I'm not against religious people, just against oppressing others beliefs. Heck if God showed up tomorrow and cleared things up, I'd be back in church in a second... but, I just lack the necessary proof to overcome my objections.

Do you get enough hits/visitors to the website to make it "worth it" to sell ads?

If so, can you do "demographic targeting" to attract sponsors? Such as "Only show my ad if the user is between 18 and 65 yrs old, male, etc?

Paul Zhao

From most research, no other site in Greensboro get's the traffic Daily Planet does, other then the News-Record.com site, and frankly they're going to be tough to beat.

If I do nothing, we average around 70,000 visitors a week, and about 100,000 page views. This isn't including straight RSS readers, or the new email service. We've had days over over a million visitors (for instance the release of the Saddam video), but overall do fairly well with traffic.

I'm still hoping to launch a physical version of the site. A "real" paper, if only once, just to say "I' did it" and I'd like to build a mobile version of the site for cell phones.

Now how much of that's local? I don't know. Unfortunately the demographic of people who read the site, and the demographic who live in this area seem to be in conflict with one another. Locals aren't technically inclined (the majority) and those who actually do own computers like to post glitter graphics on their myspace pages. Not to knock our citizens, but this isn't seattle. Anyhow, This site has lots of "local" content here., which does attract a lot more local users then alot of sites.

I'd gladly sell ad space to any politician interested. I'm personally sick of eating PBJ's, and the first person to toss me $100.00 gift certificate for Golden Coral gets Jack's spot!

Wow, that's surprising that the majority of your readers aren't local. I guess I fall into that category, I worked in Gboro for about 7 months, now I live in DC, but I read your site because I can relate. I'm also guessing a lot of your readers are people that lived in, or are from greensboro, then moved to other cities when the became adults (for college, jobs, etc). Due to your site visitors mostly being "non-local", what's the "stickiness" of your site? "Stickiness" as in average PV/visit, and "bounce rate" (% of people who only viewed one page before leaving the site).

Your web stats are really impressive, do most people come in through a "side door", as in not land on your home page, but an internal page, such as from search engines, or random link linking to an internal page?

Sorry if I'm being intrusive, I'm just curious. Of course, you don't have to answer any of the questions if you don't feel comfortable with sharing the data.

Paul Zhao

No I'm completely open about it, especially since this site is collaboration from all of it's participants, not just myself...

The bounce rate usually is around 80% with average time on the site about 2 minutes. Most of the traffic comes in from the individual articles, rather then the front page or the forum pages. I've tried to increase these entrances by adding more content to the pages, but I'm beginning to theorize Google has some sort of algorithm that can identify PHPBB boards and adapts to it's architecture. That or it's just not targeted enough to generate organic traffic.

Either way, I'm satisfied with the performance of the site and after a summer of beating my head against the wall I think the new software is finally performing on par or better then the pre-summer conversion. Hopefully I can get my head out of the code, and back into promoting the site.

I think we do command a large local audience, I just think as far as the web is setup, it's a "real big place" and overall no matter what you do on any website, it's going to mature into a world or "English speaking" nature eventually. I'm technically looking for a good way to translate all the pages dynamically into other languages eventually. Unfortunately I have to keep growing the site. Originally, the site could be hosted anywhere, but last month I started getting warnings of using our 70 giggabytes of bandwidth by months end. Very soon I suspect, we will have to upgrade the hosting. In order to pay for that hosting, it costs money.

The truth is I'm considering losing the DP name and going back to just Greensboring. I know I'm so indecisive, but I really want this site to represent the area, a homage to the triad. I haven't made my mind up, but it's important to me, that we don't forget the reason this site exists is because of people like Billy Jones, Ed Cone, & Sue Polinksky, Roch Smith and their blogs & websites, and their local community that's supported all us "other" bloggers who came after them. I grew up here, I live here, I work here... If the only thing I can give back is this community which has connected us to the world, then I'll die happy.

Thanks for the response.

2 minutes of average site visitor's pretty impressive, most sites are about 30-45 seconds or so, and the 80% bounch rate's about average for a media site.

I'm glad you're staying true to Greensboro, vs major media sites such as nytimes trying to be "world wide", and have a specific section dedicated to local audience.

Keep up the good work, shoot me an AIM sometime, at SN "SF2Alpha".

I'm a fan.
--Paul.

Wow, thanks for the props Beth.

As to Beth's traffic, I've wrote many times Beth has the most popular blog in town and probably the most popular in the state. And while I don't have access to Beth's internal stats my market research (and I do a lot of market research) shows numbers and demographics right on target with the numbers Beth quotes.

By the way, Beth, I edged you out at Technorati today but it's so close I'm not bragging... much.

Locally it's the N&R, Greensboring, EdCone.com then me. On occasion I edge past Ed but I never catch Beth.

Now if I could only get my traffic back to what it was in April, summer is killing me.

Billy, are you on FeedBurner yet?

Seriously... do it!... I was a little aprehensive to redirect the feeds to another site, and took a chance when Google bought them, but it's really a great little service, especially the auto ping feature.

I would totally vote for Jack he is intelligent and seems to know what he is doing!

Jenn