PENINSULA DAILY NEWS finished 2013 by attracting a record-breaking online audience.
The newspaper’s 15-year-old website, www.peninsuladailynews.com, logged a total of 19,217,309 page views, a 47.2 percent jump over the 13,055,260 page views recorded in 2012.
Page views demonstrate the volume of traffic a website receives.
The PDN’s website is far and away the dominant news, information and advertising website for the North Olympic Peninsula, according to statistics from Omniture, Quantcast and Google Analytics, all of which measure Web traffic.
The website also increased visits by its loyal “power users” by thousands every month.
Power users
The number of visits to the site increased to 5.53 million in 2013 from 5.26 million in 2012.
Repeat visits by “power users” who used the site 100 to 200 times or more went from 1.33 million in 2012 to 1.45 million in 2013.
“We are especially proud of the huge number of loyal visitors and heavy users of our website,” said John Brewer, PDN publisher and editor.
“Peninsuladailynews.com is the go-to source for breaking news in Jefferson and Clallam counties — and, supplementing the print edition of the PDN, it’s the site to read about what the North Olympic Peninsula is talking about every day.”
The website had its highest number of 2013 page views — 1,889,943 — in May.
More than 75,000 of the page views were of the PDN’s stories and photos of the May 10 logging bulldozer rampage in the eastern Port Angeles neighborhood known as Gales Addition that smashed four homes, a pickup truck, a boat and multiple sheds and other outbuildings — in addition to the toppling of a Clallam County Public Utility District power pole that knocked out power to thousands of electricity customers.
Barry Alan Swiegel was arrested. Swiegel has been undergoing mental evaluations to determine his fitness for a criminal trial.
The PDN’s website had 9.5 million page views in 2011, 8.66 million page views in 2010 and 6.47 million page views in 2009.