We are usually too busy getting out the news in real-time for the community to brag on ourselves, but we thought this would be a good time.

Our friendly competitors in the local media market have released their readership information and we are always curious to see how we match up. We are a 3-person team, it’s tough to keep up some days.

You see, what was once a wild dream of a start-up for us is barely in the second year. We have found our groove, we have refined the advertising options for our community partners, and we have some exciting things planned for the future. But as anyone in business has asked themselves – How Do We Stack Up?

Well, how about this for some statistics:

– Your local, well-known newspaper has just reported a TOTAL distribution (readership) of 6,196
– Another local, online news source has reported their statistics this week: (500 views per day, 61,130 TOTAL views for the year, and 26,759 TOTAL readers since January 1)

We got curious, so we pulled up our Google Analytics data and even WE were surprised by what we saw.

From January 1, 2014 to today, here are the online statistics for SweetwaterNOW:

– We have had right at 4.5 million page views since the beginning of the year, which is an average of right around 16,400 page views a day! That’s a lot of eyes reading the latest news in the region.

– On our busiest news day we saw 67,000 pageviews! YES, all in one day.

– SweetwaterNOW has had 294,245 TOTAL READERS since January 1. Yes, you read that right. Almost 300,000 readers have visited our page, isn’t that neat?

– Each day we are seeing around 75% returning readers and 25% new readers! Welcome, new readers.

There are a lot of other statistics that we, as nerds, loved looking at, but those are the few we find most important to share. And those don’t even include our engagement on Facebook! We assume most of you also join us there to see what Sweetwater is up to.

When you advertise with us as a business, or check in with us each morning for your local news, know that you are a part of the most-read news media in Sweetwater County. Once again, we could not do this without the support of our community, our partners and sponsors, and our advertisers.

Enough of that! Back to reporting the news.

Thank you,

Carlo Harryman, Derek Rayback & Gary Delgado