By David Chaston
I hope you will forgive this post, but we need to blow our own trumpet.
August is going to be our best month ever in terms of the number of unique readers coming to this news service, and the number of pages of content they read.
In fact, August was a new record for us after beating the previous record - in July. Bring on September!
And it is not because of lazy clicks. We are relatively heavy with readers using desktop screens. More than 40% read that way, 55% read on mobile devices.
And you read each story for a relatively long time. Most articles are read all the way through. Our average engagement time per article shows that. And scroll tracking shows most readers go to the end of the articles.
Yes, we are permissive with commenting, but not too much. You will see a wide range of comments representing a broad spectrum of views. We let some edge comments 'through to the keeper', but we delete a handful, and we engage with commenters by email when we think it's helpful.
You may also notice that recidivist commenters who disrespect our comment policy disappear. But comment volumes are never a good indication of an article's popularity with general readers. Most days we get 40,000 unique readers reading more than 100,000 pages of content. But only about 150 readers engage in commenting. They are a special breed, not representative of the overall readership.
We love having your company. Our brilliant team work hard to ensure we explain the New Zealand economy and what drives it - even if some parts (residential real estate) dominate more than they should. But we have to cover that even if it does represent an unhealthy twist in our economy.
In 1987, the "stock market crash" affected the way Kiwis looked at our economy from a personal point of view, for two generations. It altered our DNA. Maybe the 2024 housing market downturn will do the same, killing off the mantra that housing is always a good 'investment'. Going forward it would be a whole lot healthier if we invested properly.
But wherever our economy takes us, we will report on it.
If you are a new reader, we welcome you. We hope you like what you found. If you are long-time reader, we have always appreciated you joining us.
The hardest part of what we do is earning a crust from our always-free access. The free access for almost everything won't change. And neither will the struggle to pay the bills. If you aren't already doing so, we hope you value what we deliver enough to support us. You can sign up at any of the Press Patron buttons on any page. And you can then go ad-free if you wish. I hope you can do that.
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