Best month this year

The summer holidays with schools and parliament out are normally a difficult period for news outlets with stories thin on the ground and many regular readers away on holiday.

July, however, proved to be the best month so far this year for AudlemOnline with 87,656 readers clicking on, an average of 2,827 a day. That is 19% up on last July.

There are three reasons for the increase, AudlemOnline's statistics department has concluded:

• The launch of AudlemCW3, the Facebook page designed to appeal to potential visitors to Audlem, also seems to have attracted more readers to AudlemOnline.
• The Hit & Run incident just over a week ago at Swanbach resulted in almost 10,000 readers clicking on to the breaking news with the two follow-up stories on the subsequent fatal crash at Baldwins Gate also seeing much interest. This was, without doubt, the major factor in July's very high readership.
• The Audlem Transport Festival and Gathering of Historic Narrow Boats seems to interest more people each year so many clicked on for details of the weekend's events.

Until July, AudlemOnline's readership had only increased marginally since 2015. We had always expected the website's readership to plateau at some point. So far this year, boosted by July's strong performance, readership is up 5% on last year.

The 87,656 readers in July is still some way behind our best ever month in December 2014 when over 100,000 readers went on to AudlemOnline largely due to the interest in the 'Amazing Grace' film and its subsequent fund-raising effort.

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.