43k Visitors, 1.2 Million Hits: Record Day for Salem-News.com

Site sees busiest 24-hours as Website evaluator, Alexa.com lists Salem-News.com as the fastest news Website in the Northwest.

Salem-News.com

(SALEM, Ore.) - A news source from Salem, Oregon, the state's capitol city, is gaining a larger audience literally by the day on the Internet. In its third year Salem-News.com, the nation's only significant independent news Website, is experiencing growth far beyond expectations. It is a skyrocketing numbers game that proves new ideas are hot ideas in Web design and news coverage.

Thursday June 28th 2007, was the highest traffic day in the Website's history. Salem-News.com saw 43,473 unique visitors in a 24-hour period. Those visitors generated 1,220,284 Web "hits" as they visited 84,787 Salem-News.com articles.

A "hit" on the Internet is recorded each time a piece of artwork on any given Website loads. So if a site has an excessive number of images, the "hit count" goes up but the load time goes up along with it.

It seems Salem-News.com's design has struck the perfect balance; with the number of hits off the charts, and the quickest load time when compared to any other news site in Oregon, and many other regions for that matter. In fact, we did not find any news site in America that showed growth anywhere close to Salem-News.com.

People can visit Alexa and see the results for themselves. They admit their system is far from perfect, but it gives clear, general data about Web traffic for all significant sites.

One of the biggest draws in recent weeks have been national opinion articles by reporter Tim King. Ann Coulter: When Does This Crap End? (VIDEO) which was published at 11:59 AM, was visited 25,269 times on June 28th.

Like all Salem-News.com stories, the comment section at the bottom of each report is completely accessible to all visitors with no strings attached. In a 24-hour period, 247 comments about the story had been posted.

A recent review of Oregon Websites on Alexa.com shows Salem-News.com leading the pack with a 62% increase in visitors over the past three months, while the site's traffic rank grew by 101,491 to its current Alexa ranking: 202,083.

Alexa offers an overview of each Website's performance. Salem-News.com's speed is graded at the absolute top for NW news agencies.

Other sites in Oregon and other states are not showing the same growth patterns in Web traffic. In fact a search of all major news sites in Oregon brought these reviews from Alexa.com:

Statesmanjournal.com: "Very Slow (90% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 5.9 Seconds"

Oregonlive.com: "Very Slow (79% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 4.1 Seconds"

KGW.com: "Very Slow (88% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 5.5 Seconds"

KOIN.com: "Slow (88% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 4.0 Seconds"

KATU.com: "Slow (75% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 3.7 Seconds"

Salem-News.com: "Very Fast (89% of sites are slower), Avg Load Time: .7 Seconds"

Salem-News.com General Manager Bonnie King

Salem-News.com General Manager Bonnie King attributes much of the site's success to its simple layout and design.

"In a quickly evolving and complicated online world, we find ironically that simplicity is what people are usually striving to find in a news Website. Functionality is terribly important. We all want to get to the heart of the matter quickly, so we don't make them work to find a story, and who wants to give up personal info or their credit card numbers just to look at stories online? Nobody we know, but there are plenty of news sites that require it. We just won't do it. We're particular about the type of advertising we'll allow too, we hate pop-ups and pop-unders and all those other invasive ads just as much as our visitors do, so they'll never see them on Salem-News.com. To these people we are a breath of fresh air."

The growth of the site's traffic is shown from month to month under Visitors in the left, yellow box. This represents the daily average for that month in the number of unique visitors to Salem-News.com.

Tim King and News Director Kevin Hays say they will keep finding new ways to bring visitors the freshest news and sports from Oregon and the rest of the nation. Salem-News.com was the first news agency in the Mid-Willamette Valley of Oregon to offer Internet video, the first to launch a comment section for every story, and the first to go to the war in Afghanistan to cover the operations of Oregon National Guard soldiers.

Apparently influential, each of these Salem-News.com developments was soon mirrored on Salem, Oregon's other news Website, operated by The Statesman Journal newspaper, including the reporting from Afghanistan. Tim King says that matches the overall goals very well.

Tim King while covering the war in Afghanistan, early 2007, at a Forward Operating Base called Camp Joyce, which is close to the country's border with Pakistan

"We want to be a positive force in the world, we want to have an impact always, and the fact that a division of the world's largest newspaper company copies us move for move is nothing but a compliment, and their photographer did a good job getting still photos of the same stories I covered in Afghanistan also."

He says Salem-News.com's growth is a great reward at the end of the day, and the opportunities that the site has generated are immense. He and Kevin Hays say they both strive to always deliver stories that are important and relevant, and to always remember that the site draws a large cross section of people with opposing views.

That apolitical sense may not be conveyed in the Coulter article, or another recent opinion article King wrote titled Lieberman's Demands for War in Iran are Cowardly, "But they are opinion-editorials," he countered, "and they are presented as just that; people respond like wildfire to critical assessment and the comments in the end sometimes contain amazing amounts of important information. In our presentation of a story, all of that is preserved on the Web forever."

Salem-News.com has new sections slated to launch in the near future. Also watch for other special reports like Dr. Phil Leveque's special segments with Bonnie King on Medical Marijuana, and our original Cartoon Series Nota Bene by Leonardo, and a special new Salem Food Critic's Blog.

Oregon again has a pioneering enterprise spirit; the only independent news Website in America not owned by any TV station or newspaper, and not funded with money from prescription companies, Salem-News.com.

Businesses interested in advertising opportunities are encouraged to contact our sales office: adsales@salem-news.com