Website visitors exceed 15,000

Last month, theorion.com hit an important benchmark when the number of unique visitors to the site exceeded 15,000. That's triple the number of copies The Orion prints every Wednesday.

Maybe more impressive is the number of page views to the site in February, 443,997. That's way more than double the traffic last September (200,101) when the new Orion website went online.

These analytics from The Orion's hosting service don't tell why the numbers are increasing so quickly, but it's fair to say that more readers generally are going to the Web to get their news and theorion.com is doing a good job of providing it. I believe the successful transition to putting new content on the site daily is what's responsible for the dramatic growth this semester.

Another statistic, I think, shows this. In the 41,608 visits to the site (2.62 visits per unique visitor) in February, 10.67 pages were viewed on average. The BBC News website, one of the best and most popular in the world, gets between three and four pages on average.

Congratulations, Orionites!