Backfence citizen media site attracts 10% of locals

Backfence.com CEO Susan DeFife says the local citizen journalism site has been successful so far.


Backfence.com CEO Susan DeFife says the local citizen journalism site has been successful so far.

Usage-wise, more than 10 percent of local residents in the site’s communities are logging on, and one percent are posting. “We don’t have as many posts as we’d like to have,” but the site has made real inroads in its communities, she says.

November 13, 2006 by
Filed Under: Social Media

COMMENTS

  • G. Patton Hughes

    I have to ask the source or methodology used to estimate this reach figure as well as wonder if it references in specific time period (daily, weekly or monthly) or whether this is from date of inception?

    Also, I would wonder if the reach figure is a general figure for all the backfence locales or whether one has attained greater success than others.

    Also, the figure would be more impressive if it were based on a survey based on a random sampling of the households in a particular community instead of the notoriously hard to interpret site log statistics.

    For instance, using log statistics, I could estimate that paulding.com reaches as many as one-third the households in our community weekly and as many as half the community weekly. The daily stats establish, for instance, paulding.com may have as many as 11,500 unique visitors in a day and if we applied that figure to the full household count of ~32,000 households; the daily reach of one-third of households might be defensible.

    Of course such site statistics are particularly difficult to interpret. For instance, unique visitors can count as one, the multitude of visitors from an institution like a school system that reports one browser instance at a particular IP that is constantly active instead of 100 individual browsers, each of which overlap usage meaning only one visit is recorded.

    GP Hughes