Cortes Currents just broke a record. For the past year or so, there have been more than 1,500 plays a month on our podcast system. In the past 7 days there have been more plays than we usually see in a month:
Most of them come from Mansons Landing, as you can see in this list of the top 3 locations for plays during the past 7 days.
This traffic is not coming through one or two podcasts. Our top two during this period received 62 and 39 plays, respectively.
The increased traffic may have been in response to a number of recent posts.
Looking back over time, our #1 location is Mansons Landing.
Squirrel Cove, Whaletown, Heriot Bay, Quathiaski Cove, Powell River and Lund are also on the list, but much further down.
Only two of our top 7 areas for plays, Mansons Landing and Campbell River, are within Cortes Radio’s FM listening area.
We know there are many people with some connection to Cortes in the other cities listed below. (They once lived on Cortes, or come here for visits, or maybe just hear good things about the island.) We do not know how many of the users listed below have a connection to Cortes, and how many just wandered in from the net.
Added Sep 10: I was informed that the two American cities that were in the list above are ‘have large datacenters which almost certainly host web crawlers and podcast indexers that are crawling your site – unfortunately not real humans.’ Googling them, I found these cities indeed do have datacenters. I cannot verify whether they have ‘web crawlers and podcast indexers’ or not, and couldn’t do much about it if this is true, as this is a screenshot from SoundCloud – not my website. However to be cautious, I removed them from my list and find the revised chart is much closer to what Google Analytics tells me about the traffic on Cortes Currents.
The Google Analytics on the Cortes Currents website works differently. It tracks users rather than plays (or pageviews) back to their locations.
This is also a different audience, who largely prefer to read rather than listen to articles.
Most of our readers come from outside our listening area, which is interesting because they like to read about Cortes Island.
A new version of Google Analytics (G4A) took effect as of July 1. This has resulted larger numbers being attributed to cities and the ‘not set’ (i.e. – not city) areas receiving smaller numbers.
Up until now the #1 source of Cortes Currents traffic has been a ‘not set’ area which undoubtedly includes Cortes and much of the surrounding rural areas. It is still the number one source, when the data is viewed by the old Analytics program. However this has changed under G4A, and our reduced rural area is now #3.
Over the course of the past 12 months, the new Google analytics program (G4A) states 41,812 people visited Cortes Currents. Their top 3 points of origin were, in order of magnitude
- Vancouver
- Campbell River
- And a rural area which most likely encompasses much of Cortes Radio’s listening area (including Cortes and Quadra Islands).
If we were looking at how often people came, rather than where they live, Cortes Island would most likely be at the top.
Top image credits: Opening the figures up – Photo by Tianyi Ma on Unsplash