NewCanaanite.com Hits 1 Million Pageviews

During its highest-ever month for traffic, in July, NewCanaanite.com reached a milestone in passing 1 million total pageviews since launching last year.

We started this news site with the idea of covering in more depth and with a truly local sensibility those New Canaan issues and happenings that we felt truly mattered to residents, business owners and other stakeholders here—parks, the downtown, history, resident profiles, pets, traffic, land use, schools, parking, public safety and youth sports, to name some.

Because local people decided to support us—our dedicated readers and advertisers—the news site has gained traction here in New Canaan and has become a regular source of local news for many.

On behalf of Terry and myself, I would like to thank you as we mark this milestone and look to the future. Coming from a purely editorial background to launch and manage this business as well as the development of the site—design, sales and platform, in addition to reporting the news—we couldn’t have known back in January 2014 that the most surprising and most rewarding part of creating NewCanaanite.com would be that it brought us closer to the community where we grew up. In many ways, NewCanaanite.com has been a sort of second chance here for me and Terry, and we’ve rediscovered our hometown—its people, places, history and strong sense of community—through reporting on the town and the people who make it go.

We joined the peerless New Canaan Chamber of Commerce and held a launch party a few months after launch on the floor of our first advertiser’s shop, New Canaan Olive Oil on Elm Street. More than one year later and not a week passes that we’re not calling in at each of those places to say hello and talk about what’s happening. We could go on about our advertisers—such as Walter Stewart’s and Karl Chevrolet, two iconic and longstanding New Canaan businesses that support nearly every worthwhile, grassroots community-related event and cause, and have done so for decades.

We also quickly found connections and forged strong relationships with local nonprofit groups, serving as media sponsor at events run by the Carriage Barn Arts Center, New Canaan Preservation Alliance and Dog Days New Canaan. In the fall, we strengthened our relationship with the terrific New Canaan Library, and now a widget appears on their homepage (lower-left here) that runs our news feed.

We decided early on to focus entirely on New Canaan and only report articles that would look out of place on a news site covering any other town (here’s a look at our most-read stories of 2014). Outside of commuters to New York City, our site is being read almost exclusively in Connecticut, and most in New Canaan—here’s a screen grab from Google Analytics that breaks down our traffic here:

A screen shot from Google Analytics shows traffic distribution from NewCanaanite.com within Connecticut.

Traffic on the site has grown steeply and steadily since Terry wrote our first article (covering a NCHS varsity basketball game) on Jan. 31, 2014: The month just ended, July, was our best-ever month, reaching 96,365 pageviews and 26,330 unique visitors. The open and click-thru rates on our newsletter also have continued to grow, even as we take on new subscribers every day (you can sign up here, it’s a daily newsletter that’s delivered at 6 a.m. M-F).

As a sign of our readers’ interest in locally, originally reported news, here are two striking statistics from our newsletter service provider, Mailchimp:

Newsletter Data, NewCanaanite.com

For work done in 2014, we earned eight ‘Excellence in Journalism’ awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Connecticut Chapter, and have been covered extensively in our own field, appearing in articles from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, Street Fight Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review and American Journalism Review.

We very soon will be announcing a new partnership with a venerable New Canaan-based nonprofit organization that’s going to yield some very fun things for our readers—stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, we want to say again—‘Thank You’ to our readers and advertisers, and we look forward to many more years of collaboration and success.