Salem-News.com Passes Statesman Journal in Online Ranking

The 159-year old newspaper has been steadily edged in on by the only independent online news group in the country.

Salem-News.com

(SALEM, Ore.) - For nearly six years, Salem-News.com has been a constant in the Willamette Valley. The first independently owned online news group in the Nation, Salem-News.com has grown from an idea to a mainstay in homes and offices across America, and around the world.

Today, according to Alexa.com, the small upstart of a news company has surpassed the Gannett-owned Salem based newspaper, The Statesman Journal, in online ranking.

Globally, Salem-News.com is ^#75,414 and Statesmanjournal.com is ^#75,465.

Fifty-one ranking points mean a lot.

Of all the active websites in the entire world, we are pushing toward #1. At first glance, 75,414 may seem like a big number, but keep in mind that in 2008 Google had already indexed more than one trillion discrete web addresses. Our research says that there are a minimum of 185,000,000 active sites. That puts Salem-News.com in the Top 1% of all websites on the face of the earth. Not bad for a small staff, a large vision, and a shoestring budget.

And the Statesman? Yes, they're in that top 1% as well...but after 159 years and hundreds of thousands of free newspaper advertising dollars, they ought to be doing well. Better, in fact. Just one week ago, they were ranked at just over 72,000 and Salem-News.com was about 78,000. Things change quickly in the online world.

Salem-News.com surpassing the Statesman Journal is a huge milestone for the small company, and a sign of the times for News Media overall.

It's been widely reported recently that the Internet has surpassed newspapers and radio in popularity as a news platform on a typical day and now ranks just behind TV. More people are moving to the Internet for entertainment as well, and many (especially younger) viewers are choosing online over all other mediums.

Salem-News.com does not dish out the traditional entree of daily news. An innovator in global news reach, our 42 writers, talented photographers and vast cast of contributors help create this new, unprecedented style of news delivery. And it's catching on.

Online news is not limited to a geographical area. Breaking the bonds of locality has been a challenging feat, but Salem-News.com has been blazing that trail since 2004, and successfully. The company was a little early; ahead of its time, but now business leaders and consumers alike are paying attention. Our vision has become a common theme among those that forecast the future of news.

Bringing a solid news product via the Internet to an all-inclusive audience, regardless of their level of technological equipment or know-how has been a standard since the beginning--and there is no subscription, no fee, no strings attached.

Another fundamental goal for Salem-News.com has been a fast load time.

Our load time is very fast at 0.727 Seconds, 89% of sites are slower; whereas StatesmanJournal.com loads in 2.65 Seconds, 57% of sites are faster. That is a key difference in our vision, and implementation of user-friendly programs.

Alexa.com gives the standard guidelines for ideal Web response times as:

• 0.1 second (one tenth of a second). Ideal response time. The user doesn't sense any interruption.
• 1 second. Highest acceptable response time. Download times above 1 second interrupt the user experience.
• 10 seconds. Unacceptable response time. The user experience is interrupted and the user is likely to leave the site or system.

We have consistently achieved this great load time by maintaining ease of functionality for multi-platform users as a priority. Never have you seen a pop up, a pop-over or any of the seemingly endless invasive, irritating and time consuming devices used as revenue sources for other sites on Salem-News.com, nor will you.

Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The traffic ranking is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and reach so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users.

There is no doubt that numbers change. Though Salem-News.com has been moving toward #1 consistently these last months, there will continue to be ups and downs on that graph. Alexa says that in general, traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as not reliable. Conversely, the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its traffic ranking becomes.

That's what we're counting on.

To view Ranking for the top 500 sites on the web, go to: Alexa Top Sites