I have been involved with Western Producer’s online offerings since we registered www.producer.com in 1995.
When we started out, it was fair to say that nearly all our traffic was either hyper-local, western Canadian folks or from Los Angeles and New York wanting to buy the URL producer.com from us. For some reason, there were quite a few folks in those parts of the world who liked the idea of owning something to do with being a producer. I can understand them wanting to be associated with farmers and agriculture, but those Hollywood folks sure seemed anxious to get in on our act.
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Like in real estate, internet success is measured by location. The location of your users helps define who you are online.
This past year, our traffic on producer.com was 75 percent Canadian, with the bulk of that coming from users in Western Canada. Considering our content, I can assume most are producers like you.
I say “you” because I am thinking that because you are reading this, “you” are most likely a farmer, an agrologist or someone working in our industry. Otherwise, I am thinking, you might find all this detailed information about markets, agronomy, animal husbandry, policy and western Canadian centric rural lifestyles rather complex or uninteresting, although I doubt the latter is true.
Online readers from the United States also enjoy producer.com, considering that 15 percent of our traffic comes from that country. Every day I do see a number of readers in the Washington, D.C., region, and I can reasonably assume those are government folks looking for news about Canadian agriculture.
We also see regular traffic from Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, which is likely related to commodity marketers looking for Canadian insights from the WP.
Most of the American online traffic is made up of farmers and ag folks like you from the northern Great Plains, where the farming is nearly identical, except for the policy part.
About one percent comes from the United Kingdom and Australia because of heritage and the Down Under agriculture similarities to our own farming conditions.
India, Germany and France finish up the major international components.
Turkey, India and other south Asian countries, are often interested in Canadian farming due to our pea, lentil, chickpea and mustard production.
From time to time, our stories become popular in other parts of the world. Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan will also show up from time to time. Recently, I observed a wave of South African interest. All in all, these are a small portion.
In 2010, our traffic was 87 percent Canadian and eight percent American, which had changed to 83 percent Canadian and 10 American by 2013 and 79-13 last year.
Are our U.S. neighbours taking over? No. During the same period, we have increased the number of users on the site by four times to more than a million visitors.
At some point, there is a terminal number of farmers and interested parties in Canadian prairie agriculture. There are more of them than there are of us, so growth of the audience interested in the WP south of the 49th parallel will likely continue to rise as a percentage of the total.
