I analyzed the year-end stats from our Web sites today.

The amazing growth of traffic to MonroeTalks.com was the highlight, although there were other contenders.

We launched MonroeTalks to give residents of Monroe County a chance to engage in a community conversation - or many small conversations. It also provided a place to share photos, showplace our bloggers and host a comprehensive and interactive calendar.

It was an experiment - I don’t know of any Web site quite like it in the country. We didn’t know whether Monroe County would embrace the new site or ignore it.

In our marketing, we used the tagline, “Join the Conversation.” As it turned out, thousands of people took us up on the invitation.

In July, the first full month, the site had nearly a half-million page views. It grew to 800,000 in August, and topped 1 million by October. To provide some perspective, our news Web site, monroenews.com, topped 1 million page views for the first time in August.

In October, MonroeTalks.com not only topped 1 million page views, it also passed monroenews.com. By December, it had reached nearly 1.2 million page views.

That’s a lot of time spent by thousands of Monroe County residents, engaging in a fascinating variety of conversations.

Another candidate for highlight of the year - besides monroenews.com topping 1 million page views - is the steady growth of the traffic to the blogs on Blogsmonroe.com.

Traffic to the blogs increased during 11 of the 12 months of 2007, nearly reaching 200,000 page views in December. Three of the 38 blogs topped 10,000 page views on their own.

The thing that amazes me the most: The variety of topics that are discussed every day between the forums on MonroeTalks.com and the blogs on Blogsmonroe.com.  Pick a topic - it’s there somewhere. And if it isn’t, wait a few minutes. There’s a new post on a blog or forum just about every minute.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.