The past week has made abundantly clear to us the power of the Internet to inform and connect people. The devastation in Greensburg — and the concern and curiosity it sparked across the world — sent traffic on Kansas.com soaring.
On a typical weekday, Kansas.com has about 260,000 page views from about 37,000 different visitors.
On Wednesday, five days after the tornado struck Greensburg, we had 9.85 million page views from 710,000 different visitors. That was the peak. All week, Kansas.com’s traffic has been 20 to 40 times normal. I’m writing this on Friday evening, and of now, our tracking service says we’ve had 40 million page views by 2.6 million different users since May 5. Ninety-five percent of those page views were in our photo galleries.
That tracking service, by the way, was so overwhelmed by our traffic for a time earlier this week that it stopped reporting statistics for our sister Web sites in the McClatchy Co. An e-mail went out across the company explaining that Kansas.com was responsible.
– Nick Jungman