Record Traffic Slows Salem-News.com Tuesday

Salem-News.com

(SALEM) - We appreciate the patience of our visitors as Internet traffic nearly overwhelmed Salem-News.com in the last two days. Since becoming part of the Google News feed last week, our counters have been working overtime, and Salem-News.com stories are showing up in all kinds of places, like Yahoo News, gasprices.com and other national venues. The big stories this week included the soldiers killed in Iraq who officials initially believed were missing, the Salem Police SWAT standoff Tuesday night, a story on gas prices, and another on coastal airports in Oregon. We are starting to get a feel for what type of Salem, Oregon stories the national sites are looking for, and more than anything they seem to be the same stories that draw the strongest local interest. Salem-News.com`s unique visitor count for Tuesday was 12,839. In the same period of time we racked up 198,353 web hits which is a different figure from the visitor count. 17,916 Salem-News.com stories were opened on Tuesday. This type of traffic requires a large amount of data to transfer, and the huge demand placed on the site Tuesday by national and international visitors seemed to peak in the mid-afternoon. One story that had gained major national attention is Family Releases Recording of PFC Tommy Tucker's Last Call Home (Audio) salem-news.com/articles/june192006/tucker_tom_guard_4_61906.php with comments from all over the nation including places like Virginia, Maryland and Missouri. The comments offer a good cross sampling of how deeply people around the country are affected by the loss. Other factors that seem to be contributing to Salem-News.com`s steady growth are the multi-media format offering published stories, photos, video reports, audio stories on demand and a comment section at the end of each story allowing visitors to voice their views without offering so much as an e-mail address. It remains our goal to offer our visitors a hassle free news environment where there are no surprises like pop-ups or other irritating bits of information. Please be patient as your local news website goes through a few growing pains, our increasing popularity is what we always anticipated and now it is here. If you experience slow loading or as in the case Tuesday, no loading at all, please give the site a few minutes and try again.