Capturing public attention and imagination is what we do as journalists. What we do with your time once we have enticed you in usually determines whether you will let us do it again.
The Western Producer, in electronic or print form, repeatedly entices more Canadian farmers and those interested in food and agriculture than any other journalistic enterprise in the nation.
So we must have hit on the right formula.
In print, we reach about 100,000 of you each week. Online, we reach about 40,000, although those numbers increase and decrease a bit from week to week.
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How do I know that our online readers are mainly farmers? I have tools that allow me to instantly dig into demographics. I can’t tell if Joe Farmer is reading a story, but I can tell that Joe is from Winkler, Man., for example, and whether he or she, (users are unnamed in the data) is a return user of producer.com, as well as how many pages have been viewed by that reader.
I can tell if a user accesses us on a desktop computer, a tablet or a phone.
I can tell that most of our online users are involved in agriculture because the usage rates rise and fall in concert with weather conditions and seeding and harvest periods.
Access to producer.com through mobile devices rises when farmers are likely to be working from their tractor or combine cabs, and desktop computer access increases during times when conditions dictate that farmers are working from their offices or dens.
Last week, 115,500 of you came to producer.com, nearly three-fold a normal week. You viewed almost 200,000 web pages while you were there. Harvest was underway, so 62 percent of you used a smart phone to reach us.
Fifty-seven percent were male and 42 female; 18 percent of you were between 55 and 64 years old and 20 percent came from three age ranges: 45 to 54, 35 to 44 and 25 to 34. Six percent came from those younger than 24 and 11 percent of access came from people older than 65.
This was the same as any other week at the WP.
The story that brought in the big numbers was about the sale of a $26.5 million farm, lock, stock and barrel, with a crop in the field.
Only 8,000 acres, but it spoke to your imaginations.
