Archive: Opinions

Fun facts to know and share: Readers who read the Lansing Star on a Kindle last month read the highest number of articles and spend the most time reading them.  Interestingly, considering the current state of the Smart Phone market, Blackberry users spend the second most time reading the Lansing Star.  Internet Explorer users come in third on the amount of time spent, though it is not much more than half the time Kindle users spend.  PC users are and have always been the majority of our readers.  But today almost as many readers get the Star on their Macs.  One person even read the Star on a Playstation last month!

71% of our readers still read the Lansing Star on a computer.  About 16% read us on their phones, and just over 12% on tablets.  Tablet users spend the most time reading the Star, followed by computer users and then phone readers.

For years the News and Around Town pages were our most popular.  They still are, but these days a lot of readers are viewing the Opinions page.  Last month almost 25,000 pages were viewed.

We get the most views from readers in the United States, but we regularly have readers in other countries.  In some cases we can tell when certain readers are travelling by the number of hits in one country or another.  Last month the most visits came from the United States followed by Canada , Germany, the United Kingdom, india, Brazil, Hungary, Australia, Italy, South Africa, and the Philippines.  We had 7 readers in China and 7 in New Zealand, 6 each in Ireland, Netherlands and Norway,  and five Greece, Indonesia and South Korea.  28 other countries yielded one reader apiece, including Russia, Slovakia, Finland, Haiti and Zambia.  Readers in Thailand read the highest number of pages, and two Bulgarians spent the most time reading the Star, followed by Japanese, Thai and United States readers.

Over 98% read the Star in English.  I imagine those who read it in Hungarian, Portugese, Italian, German, French, and Chinese used online language translators.  In my experience online translations are hilarious, so it is possible that some people read the Star as humor!

Over 38% of our readers do so over Time Warner Cable.  About 5% access us via Cornell University's network.  7.8% use Verizon Online or Verizon Wireless to read the Star, as opposed to the 1.3% using AT&T.  3.6% come via Finger Lakes Technology group.  About 2.2% read us from the Lansing school campus.

What does this tell us?  First of all, we continue to have strong local readership.  We know that about half of our readers each week come via Google searches, which accounts for a variety of readers across the United States and many of our international readers. 

The growing tablet market is good for the Star and, I imagine,  all online newspapers.  Despite the Tech pundits dire predictions that computers are dead or close to death, our numbers show that computers still dominate. But smart phones and tablets are quickly gaining ground.

Most of all it tells us that our little corner of the world is diverse and interesting to a lot of people.  I wonder if there is opposition to sewers in Zambia...

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