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Marina City Online audience doubles in ’09 Top headlines show reader interest in running, fitness, and murder 5-Dec-09 – Coverage of its dispute with a condo board, tinkering with its web site to appease Google, and a lucky break with photo coverage of the Chicago Marathon helped Marina City Online set record traffic levels for a third year in a row. According to Google Analytics, which measures traffic to a web site, MCO received 50,872 visits from January 1 through December 4. Averaging 4,524 visits per month through November, the news and information web site should reach 54,000 visits by the end of the year. The number of unique visitors to the site this year is currently 30,172 but in all of 2008, only 11,474 different people visited. In 2007, the first year Google Analytics was installed, there were 7,823 visitors. To be sure, these numbers are quite small compared to a metro news site like the Chicago Tribune. However, our coverage area is mostly just one city block in downtown Chicago, with an estimated population of 1,400 people. The number of pages viewed increased significantly to more than 176,000 in 2009, probably because there are now a lot more pages. The average number of pages viewed per visit, however, rose more modestly to about three and half pages per visit. The average time a visitor spends on the site has not varied much since 2007, always about three and a half minutes.
In late December 2008, Marina Towers Condominium Association, upset that Marina City Online was using the words “Marina City” on its web site about Marina City, threatened to fine MCO editor Steven Dahlman and a sponsor who also lived in the complex $1,000 each. The condo association appeared to claim ownership of the words “Marina City,” although there was never any evidence of this and the only registered trademarks that include the words belong to the owner of Hotel Sax and other commercial property at Marina City. MCO subsequently registered the service marks “Marina City Online” and “Marina City News.” The fines never happened, but breathed new life into MCO’s news coverage. More than 200 news articles were published in 2009, covering Marina City, River North, and the north side of the Chicago Loop. Additionally, about 700 images were added to the site. 20 of those images were of the 32nd running of the Bank of America Chicago Marathon on October 12. For several hours, Marina City Online was the only news source being offered by Google for searches of information on the marathon. That brought 1,329 people to site but that was not the most number of visits in any single day. That would be 4,528 visits on February 6, following an article about MCO by the Chicago Tribune. So what were the big stories? In March, MCO started counting the number of times each story was selected. That would exclude stories published sooner, of course, but these are our top ten headlines of 2009…
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