Citypages.com Traffic Jam: March '09 wrap-up
By Jen Boyles in The Traffic Jam
Monday, Apr. 20 2009 @ 2:40PM
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There's something oddly uniting about ratings, traffic numbers and stats -- perhaps it's the lonely voyeur in all of us that wants to take in information simultaneously with the rest of the world. With that in mind, we introduce a new monthly feature called The Traffic Jam. And what would traffic be without the jam? Please allow Minneapolis' own New Kids On The Glock (!) to entertain your ears with some heavenly glockenspieling as you read.
March madness isn't just for basketball -- CityPages.com had a whirlwind month as well, netting 2,532,902 total pageviews, our top month so far in 2009 (These numbers are pulled from our internal ad tracking server, 24/7 OAS, which doesn't count a pageview if there's no ad served on it). Our overall number topped both March 2008 and last month by more than 250,000 pageviews, 40 percent of that growth derived from local-only traffic (Cities outside of our own that visited us most were Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles).
The first week in March set the pace for the rest of the month on our news blogs, which netted 385,000 views for the month. Blotter's top post for the month reported on a laughable phonics fumble: A CNN newscaster said not once but twice that Northwest Airlines is now serving penis. And speaking of foot-in-mouth disease, we featured many such instances by our lovely Congresswoman -- read by a smirking populace from the Metro and beyond.
Also explosively growing is Hot Dish. The food blog reached a total of 115,000 pageviews for the month. A big reason why: Free pizza. Lots and lots of free pizza. And hey, why stop there? Why not get the cheese on the pizza free, too? Yes, let us thank all that is holy for the Neopolitan nectar that is Punch.
Meanwhile, the music blog held steady from months prior with 179,000 pageviews for March. Key posts on Gimme Noise included one where David Hansen poked fun at one of Courtney Love's rambling rants on her blog (she showed up in the comments and called us assholes) and others spanning SXSW (where we stationed music editor Andrea Swensson). And we can't talk Gimme Noise without mentioning "erotic specialist" Patrick Strait, whose "Wet Spot" column pulled in the most comments of any of our blog posts in March.
Slideshows of local and national bands were quite popular in March as well, and our new Photobooth feature came on the scene as our top performer quite quickly (it turns out you all really like to see fun pictures of yourselves -- and who wouldn't, really?). We commissioned skilled clublife photographer Denis Jeong Plaster to set up a mini-studio at CityPages.com-sponsored Too Much Love dance night in First Avenue's mainroom and patrons flocked to get their pic taken -- even the Minneapolis police. Check it out next time you're at First Avenue on a Saturday night (and by the next evening you'll be a CityPages.com star!).
The end of the month brought a new features pageview champ with Bradley Campbell's Capitol Facebook piece, in which lobbyists were asked to rank Twin Cities legislators, (the slideshow did equally well). We even got a snotty letter from one of our local legislators who said, "It reminded me of when the football jocks used to rank the cheerleaders--and reserved their most stinging jabs for those who had spurned their advances."
Will the civic stunt maintain its supremacy? Check in next month same CP time, same CP channel.
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