Site statistics during hunt for fugitive in Santa Cruz
Our website’s readership has never been higher than for the five hours that the armed fugitive was loose in Santa Cruz. We were receiving more than 35,000 page views an hour. Our views for the day of the ordeal were 252,430, sixth best day in our history.
Here’s what the traffic spike looked like:
Here’s the list of all-time best days for the Sentinel:
Aug. 6, 2008: 399,413 – Baby photo contest
Aug. 13, 2009: 307,331 – Lockheed Fire
Aug 14, 2009: 266,804 – Lockheed Fire
Jun 21, 2008 260,111 – Trabing Fire
Sep 10, 2010: 255,386 – San Bruno explosion
Nov. 29, 2010: 252,353 - Fugitive loose in Santa Cruz
Jun 12, 2008 236,002 – Martin Fire
Jun 20, 2008 212,032 – Trabing Fire
Aug. 5, 2008: 210,808 – Baby photo contest
Nov. 2, 2010: 198,176 – Election
We were first on the story, quickly added a google map of events (which has received more than 100,000 views – not counted above) updated often, received pictures and video by cell phone and from photographers and reporters at the scene. We added a slide show, updated the photo blog and posted an early version of our A1 that evening.
The main story was recommended by more than 3,000 people on Facebook (most I’ve ever seen for a Sentinel story). We also sent out our updates and photos on both Twitter and Facebook and we added more than 50 friends during the day.
For the month of November, we received 3,475,482 page views and had 429,262 unique monthly visitors. That’s up from 2,941,376 views and 355,158 visitors last November. November 2010 was also our biggest month ever for total daily unique visitors. Here’s a graph of what our daily unique visitors looks like since Jan. 1, 2007:
