by Mr. Eric Thomas

Sometime on Thursday it happened.

Someone visited DartNewsOnline, your student news source for STA, and became the 200,000 visitor to the website, now three years and three months old.  No balloons fell from the ceiling.  No television cameras were there for the event.  Heck, I was probably the only person in the universe to notice.

But to me, it’s amazing: the entire website.  Almost four years ago, web-editor-to-be Sydney Deatherage and editor-in-chief Rosie Hodes agreed that it was time to go online with the Dart.  We had flirted with going online, but only in the way you flirt with someone you would never truly date.  This was never going to really happen.

And then it did.

On August 21, 2009, we had our first two visitors.  One visitor entered the site from Basehor, Kansas. That reader stayed 0:00 minutes.  Not a good start.  Another reader entered from Kansas City, Missouri.  I am pretty sure that was our editor Sydney as she stayed 14:06 minutes.

A few days later we introduced DartNewsOnline to the school at a pep rally.  We threw out shirts.  We yelled and screamed.  We made a huge deal.  And 166 visitors came to the site. The staff was overjoyed.

So, how do I know all of this exact information about the site: the location of its readers? The raw numbers of its daily traffic?

We use a little online tool called Google Analytics: a service offered by Google that tracks the details of the traffic to your website.  If you insert a little line of code into each page on your website that information is sent to Google.  And they make it useful to you, the website operator.

The data collected by Google allows our newspaper class to learn a ton about our website, discover the habits of you the reader and helps us to set goals (“1000 hits means a pizza party!”).  I have heard advisers at much larger schools describe their traffic, and I assure you that we are no competition for them in terms of raw traffic.  But I do love the portrait of our quaint little website that emerges by looking at the numbers.  Here goes . . .

Truly World Wide Web

Our trusty little website, reporting on the news of the Windmoor campus of 580 students, doesn’t market to a global audience, but behold.  They somehow find us.  This is one of the truly astounding things for students when I first show them.

The students: “Italy? The Philippines? Mr. Thomas . . . How?”

Me: “I don’t know.” (Great teaching, right?)

But then they see that there are 155 countries on the list, including these guys:

No offense to our geography teacher Denise Rueschhoff, but the location of Guyana and Palau are a mystery to most STA students (and me).

We can also monitor if our alums are procrastinating their studies by visiting DartNewsOnline.  From the chart below, notice how many students fall into the DartNewsOnline trap, which they will admit is a result of a) boredom, b) homesickness, c) procrastination, and d) the teenage desire to creep/stalk people from afar.  Lots of credit to St. Louis University and Washington University at #10, Columbia’s University of Missouri (Go Tigers!) at #11, Chicago’s Loyola and DePaul at #13, KU‘s Jayhawks at #14 and so on . . .

But let’s also acknowledge that the big city girls of the Big Apple put NYC at #8.  But alums at the Little Apple of Manhattan, Kansas, where are you guys?  Not even in the top 25?

We read the weirdest stuff

So take a little quiz here.  Of all the videos, photo galleries, investigations, news stories, polls, interactive graphics, pep rallies and sporting events we have covered, what single post on DartNewsOnline has gathered the most traffic?  I will give you a minute.

Well, I kind of gave you the answer, didn’t I?  But from that table it is hard to tell what each post is about.  And then you click on it and it’s pretty obvious.  Kathleen Hough, STA alum of 2011, had a blog about . . . well, weird stuff.  She liked to write about embarrassing stories, reveal things that other people would never want to talk about.

But guess what?  Everybody apparently wants to read about it.

Years after the post was first published in November 2010, we still receive steady traffic from this post.  How? Of the nearly 4,000 people who have clicked through to this article, almost half come straight from Google.  And what did they search for in Google? Analytics tells us “blackheads” or “blackheads in ears.”  Yuck.

The next most popular story, #7 by Laura Neenan, is easy to discover on Google.  Simply type “Movies reflect popular culture.” That top placing has earned it those 3,800 hits–two and a half years later.  Amazing.

The peaks and valleys

Consider this graph of our daily traffic below.  The drastic ups and downs seem to make it barely intelligible.  But the tallest peaks and the lowest valleys each tell a story I think.

First, the valleys that occur each summer break, Christmas break and spring break are as predictable as the mini-valleys that happen each Saturday.  That’s obvious enough: when students are away from school, they think about . . . well, everything but school.

But what about the huge spikes?

• October 2010: You can see the spike that came from our first instance of truly unexpected and sad news: our campus cat (and the cat of Senior Mattie Davis) was killed by a car.  Students visited our online memorial and photo gallery page that day especially.
• May 2011: I challenged the journalism students to compete with one another as they posted their end-of-year project on DartNewsOnline.  Junior Jamie Seibert famously ran away with the competition and the site drew a new daily record of 850 visitors.
• February 2012: The staff took to Twitter and Facebook and set a daily record that still stands with over 1300 visitors.
• March 2012: The hilarious and embarrassing video “Stuff STA Girls Say” is posted and goes STA-viral.

So, we can draw some simple lessons about web traffic from those peaks: 1) cover breaking news quickly, 2) have contests with rewards for your staff, 3) use social media, and 4) produce stuff that will please you audience.

Most exciting to me is our recent trend as a staff — and your recent trend as our readers — to have very few valleys in readership.  You can see this in the right side of the graph above and the one immediately below (which shows the monthly traffic to the site).

We have had three blockbuster months in a row.  September, October and November beat every other month previous in DNO history.  This has been the result of tweeting by Sabrina Redlingshafer, Facebook work by Menley Brennan, blog organization by Libby Hyde and video work by Caroline Fiss.  More than anything though it has been a credit to overall staff and their content, posted up on the site by our fearless web staff: editor Anna Leach, and daily editors Lane Maguire, Adrianna Ohmes and Lauren Langdon.

How do you blow out 200,ooo candles?

As I said before, this post is not about touting the Analytics numbers of the site against another site or another school.  I am certain we are not the largest or smallest website on the internet.

But I did want to say a bit of a happy birthday to DNO: Happy 200,000th!

With yearbooks there is the unveiling of the book when it arrives from the publisher.  And the print newspaper gets to hand out a new issue every few weeks.  But the online race seems more circular and never-ending: where is the milestone?  Where is the finish line?

In the absence of the obvious milestones, we can have fun celebrating these new-digital-age milestones.  And we as the journalists, we might need to pat ourselves on the back every once in a while.

That a girl, DNO.