Theorion.com on pace for another good month

No single, blockbuster story drove traffic to theorion.com the first week of November, but analytics show the website is on pace to have another outstanding month.

For the first seven days of the month:
• 224,994 pages were viewed, which puts the site on a pace for 964,260 for the month
• Unique visitors numbered a little less than 10,000, so a total near 40,000 is a good bet.

October's record-setting traffic was helped by two big stories, the death of a student who was hit by a train near campus and a feature about Pocket Points, a new app developed by a pair of Chico State students. Both attracted more than 20,000 page views.

Even without a big story last week, lots of people were navigating to the site and staying to read stories, watch videos and comment. They visited an average of 11.3 pages per visit in the first days of the month, which was pretty typical of traffic in the past. Professional news websites are doing well when people stick around to read two or three more stories after coming to a site.

People coming to read only a story or two and then leaving is what web marketers call a high rate of "churn," a bad thing if you're trying to sell advertising on your site. 

Here are the top stories on theorion.com for the first week of November:
1. The Orion's Wildcat of the Year contest announcement - 4,550 visits
2. Out-of-towners attacked at party - 2,170

3. Baseball alumnus nears goal to pay chemo treatment - 2,170 and 480 Facebook posts
4. Campus presidents up for pay raise - 1,974 visits and 324 Facebook posts

5. Chico Halloween 2014 live Twitter feed - 1,447

6. The O-face - 1,194

7. Chico State student dies of heart failure - 1,136

8. How queer folk can best support allies - 1,075

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

The Orion Picks Up a Pacemaker

Photo by Ernesto Rivera, The Orion

The Orion has won its first print Pacemaker award -- sometimes called the Pulitzer Prize of college journalism -- since 2009. Issues from last academic year, edited by Ben Mullin and Katrina Cameron, were judged in the national contest. Winners were announced today at the Associated Collegiate Press convention in Philadelphia.

Orion photographer Emily Teague won a fifth place in the competition for feature photojournalism.

This year was the 20th time since 1988 The Orion had been nominated for a print Pacemaker. It won the award in 1988-89, 1992-93, 1994-95, 1995-96, 1996-97, 1998-99, 2002-03, 2003-04, 2004-05, 2005-06, and 2008-09.

UPDATE: The Orion took third place in the Best of Show competition for four-year weekly broadsheet newspapers in Philadelphia and ninth place in Best of Show for large-school websites. Awards were announced Sunday morning.

Well done, everyone!

theorion.com surpasses 1,000,000 page views

A check of analytics from theorion.com's web-hosting service this morning shows the The Orion's website has attracted more than a million page views this month. It's the first time the site has reached seven figures for web traffic. And October isn't over.

The numbers as of this morning:
Unique visitors: 38,119
Visits: 89,913 (2.3 per visitor)
Page views: 1,003,433 (an astounding 11.16 pages per visit).

Congratulations everyone on a job well done!

Train-death coverage drives traffic

The awful news last Monday that a woman had been struck and killed on tracks near the Chico State campus and the subsequent revelation that she had been a student at the university sent a record number of readers to theorion.com for information about the tragedy.

It's impossible to know how many of the 20,983 views of the story, or the 6,259 visits to the follow-up report, can be attributed to social-media posts by others and a local TV report about a gruesome photo that accompanied the original story (and was quickly taken down, accompanied by an apology). It is clear that the community turned to theorion.com to get the facts about what happened. (It's worth noting that the number of hits the original photo received wasn't enough to make the list of "most viewed" elements on the website.)

Visits to theorion.com from last Monday through Sunday totaled 30,353, according to analytics recorded by the newspaper's web hosting service, BlueHost. That's far and away the busiest traffic week ever. 

The other top-ranked stories last week were:

Sorority bands together to help fallen sister - 2,483 views
Navigating bro speak (cartoon) - 2,423
Gang shooting wrongly reflects Hmong community - 2,327
Stigma with high numbers of sexual partners (O-Face column)  - 1,666

Viral stories boost theorion.com traffic

It started with last month's video of Chico State faculty reading their ratemyprofessors.com reviews. Last week, it was a review of a new electronic coupon service on campus, Pocket Points, driving a traffic spike for theorion.com. Stories that go viral, sometimes attracting 10 times the traffic of a typical news story, are bringing record numbers of visitors to The Orion website.

That Pocket Points story, and a companion column by Veronica De La Cruz, helped draw 18,482 total visits to theorion.com last week, putting traffic on a pace to exceed 40,000 unique visitors in October. That would bury September's best-month-ever number by about 10,000 visitors.

Here's a list of the top traffic-generating stories so far this month:
1. Pocket Points hits Chico State - 20,379 views
2. AS to build $130,000 statue - 1,919 views
3. The tolls and triumphs of long-distance relationships - 1,634
4. Driver in creek crash faces charges - 1,039
5. In the closet a fate worse than death - 988 (in two days!)
6. Yes means yes full of holes - 925
7. Pocket Points feeds brains and bellies - 837
8. Students shouldn't suffer for Blackboard's faulty technology - 835
9. Humans of Chico State: life decisions - 744
10. Faculty stage rally for new contract - 716

Best month ever at theorion.com

Breaking news and a video of Chico State faculty reading comments from ratemyprofessors.com helped push theorion.com traffic to new records in September.

About 10,000 more people visited the site than last-month's best-ever 20,477 unique visitors, according to statistics compiled by BlueHost, the paper's web-hosting service. September's 814,405 page views topped the previous record, set in April, by 126,733.

The site continues to be incredibly "sticky": People who visit theorion.com view an average of 10.68 pages once they arrive at the site. The best professional news sites average a little more than three pages per visit. Example: Of the 6,623 visitors who navigated to the site specifically to watch the Rate My Professors video,  5,719 stuck around to read other pages before they left theorion.com, according to BlueHost.

The top stories for traffic in September were:
Professors read rate-my-professors video: 8,644 views
Suspect stabs bouncer at Riley's: 4,271
Chico dehumanizes homeless population: 1,520
Students drink, float one week after labor day: 1,455
Student missing, presumed dead: 1,436
Fallen tree destroys Gus Manolis bridge: 1,394
Man guilty of DUI sentenced: 1,299