With 2013 drawing to a close, the McGill Reporter is coming to the end of its first year as an online journal and, thanks to the magic of the Internet, we have been able to gather data on everything from how many people stopped by for a read to how long they stayed to where in the world they were when they clicked on one of our stories.
We don’t like to brag, but the numbers are pretty good. By year’s end, we will have had over 570,000 page views, with readers checking in from 213 countries or territories worldwide, ranging from Aruba to Zimbabwe.
Not surprisingly, Canada was the main country of origin for Reporter readers in 2013, but other countries in the Top 10 included (in order) the United Sates, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, India, Germany, the Netherlands, China and Sweden. Not bad for a newspaper that in 2012 had a print run of 7,500 papers per issue and was found almost exclusively in newsstands around campus.
The Reporter started 2013 with a bang, albeit it a soggy one, with our coverage of the massive flood that tore through the downtown campus in January when a major water main broke during construction on Dr. Penfield. We had over 100,000 page views that month – and a one-day record of 35,805 on Jan. 28 – with people checking in to get updates on cleanup efforts, office relocations and class cancelations and rescheduling.
Our most viewed story was A revolutionary new 3D digital brain atlas, written by Anita Kar. Published on June 26, the article highlights BigBrain, the first 3D microstructural model of the entire human brain. Created at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of the McGill University Health Centre in collaboration with researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, the BigBrain model is free and publicly available to researchers worldwide. To date, the article has been viewed over 44,000 times – outdistancing the next closest Reporter article by a whopping 28,000 views.
Read the full story in the McGill Reporter.
December 10, 2013