The Bradenton Times Celebrates Success in 2011

As the Publisher of The Bradenton Times, I wanted to express my thanks to our readers, our advertisers and especially the employees, for making this product a success. Starting any business is difficult. Starting a new business in the worst recession in nearly a century is challenging. Creating a new model for news and community information goes beyond description.

News and community information is the soul of any successful community and a vital element for democracy. Without news and factual information there would be a great loss to our way of life. At times, TBT is the only news entity covering government meetings. While these meetings are quite boring to some, without an outlet to find out what government is doing, government will often abuse their responsibilities. From Congress to a small government like Hardee County, news reports help focus the people to this abuse. The outcome is usually a change that corrects the abuse and protects the community.

120,000 unique readers (views) come to our site each month – almost double from a year ago. Our growth will continue as more people continue to find out about this useful product. Other metrics confirm that this is happening. We have more than five and half million hits each month. People are reading about 10 pages each time they visit, and we get about 5,000 reads on each of our email products. For an advertiser, this is an ever-increasing value, especially since ads start at $10 and if you can budget $1,000 a month, you will get the best local Internet exposure available for your business.

Another measure of local value is our incredibly low bounce rate. This is a person who comes to the site and only reads the first page viewed. Our bounce rate is less than 20 percent compared to the other local news site, Bradenton.com (The Bradenton Herald), which is around 80 percent. What this means is that our readers go to more content we publish when they visit, and the time on our site averages 50 minutes versus about 5 minutes for Bradenton.com. Stats are from Alexa, an independent, online data compiler.

Our goals for next year are to continue to improve our content with additional community information and focus in on all the 2012 elections, with even more coverage than we brought in 2010. It will be a critical year for us, as we look for revenues to increase enough to allow us to create a Sarasota product similar to our Bradenton news model. If you are a business, we need your support by advertising with us to continue our success.

As a valuable reader, you can also help by spreading the word, forwarding our email products, or our individual stories to friends. Just look at the bottom of any page for the link, or click here. It is that easy. We also need your comments, letters to the editor, and any news-worthy article that you might want to pass on. Together, we can continue to deliver this vital resource to this great community that we all share!

The Bradenton Times wishes everyone the Best for 2012.