October was best-ever month for theorion.com

Some mind-blowing numbers for theorion.com last month, with traffic jumping 42 percent from September and 112 percent from August. October's 1,161,342 page views was the best ever for The Orion's website.

The gains this fall clearly demonstrate the website has come into its own as an important news source for both the campus and the community.

The analytics from the paper's webhosting service, BlueHost, show theorion.com in the same company as campus newspaper websites at much bigger schools with daily print newspapers:
• The Red and Black at the University of Georgia (enrollment 34,500) claims 30,000 average daily page views
• The Daily Collegian at Penn State (enrollment 40,000) has 133,146 unique visitors who make 367,834 visits on average each month
• MichiganDaily.com at the University of Michigan (enrollment 28,283) averages 677,888 monthly page views, 368,377 monthly visits and 1.778 pages per visit.

Comparable Orion website numbers for October were:

Chico State enrollment - 16,356

Unique visitors - 42,328

105,487 visits - 2.49 visits per visitor

1,161,324 page views - 11 pages per visit 

37,462 average page views per day

Traffic per student enrolled is roughly the same for all four universities. The Orion's ability to hold onto its visitors is what accounts for its outsized page-view traffic.

The top stories on theorion.com for October were:

1. Woman killed, dismembered by train - 21,412 page views
2. Pocket Points hits Chico State - 21,114
3. Train victim identified as Chico State student - 6,805
4. Navigating bro speak (cartoon) - 3,399
5. Chico State reflects on stereotypes - 3,195
6. Sorority bands together to help fallen sister - 2,947
7. Students evacuate burning house - 2,500
8. AS to build $130,000 statue - 2,455
9. Gang shooting wrongly reflects Hmong community - 2,432
10. Student remembered as energetic, cheerful - 2,040
11. Bars close early for Halloween - 1,823