The Tennessee Star announced via Twitter Saturday that its online news site has been visited a staggering THREE MILLION times since launching February 6 of this year.
Today we passed THREE MILLION VISITS to the https://t.co/CucY9Mxgrh since our launch in February!
Thank you, Tennessee!!!! pic.twitter.com/oh37pdsNJA
— Tennessee Star (@TheTNStar) September 23, 2017
“’Refreshing’ – that’s the word we hear the most from people who meet us at events around town,” said Managing Editor Christina Botteri.
“The Tennessee Star is unique in that we offer a fact-based news site with a conservative worldview. I believe that is the reason we have seen such a tremendous expansion of readership in such a relatively short period of time,” she said.
The news media start-up was flooded with new and returning visitors within the first few weeks, requiring major server upgrades months ahead of schedule.
After a strong first month, increasing numbers of visitors sought out The Star to stay current with the breaking developments surrounding Governor Haslam’s unpopular gas tax hike. Readership quickly climbed to over 285,000 within that 31-day period.
“When we launched our original Constitution Series in April, we saw another uptick in readership with about 370,000 for the month,” Botteri recalled.
The Constitution Series is an original series discussing the content and context of the United States Constitution, which concludes Saturday with the first-of-its-kind Tennessee Star Constitution Bee for secondary school level students.
“The Star reached its first million-visit-mark May 22,” Botteri said. “Here we are, only four months later and we’ve tripled that number!”
The steep growth in traffic can be traced back to The Star’s fundamental understanding of the algorithms that drive social media traffic and coverage of the top three areas of most concern for Middle Tennesseans, as reported in the Tennessee Star-Triton Poll released in June.
“We listen closely to what people have to say about the issues they are concerned about most, which is how we’ve been able to successfully set the narrative for the two upcoming state-wide elections in 2018. I believe our polling will be proven true as we see the Gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races play out.”
“Our poll results track with what we observe personally, which is that there are three over-arching areas of great interest for the people of Middle Tennessee,” Botteri said. “They are immigration, the repeal of the gas tax, and constitutional carry.”
“It’s like I’ve said before: people are deeply concerned about the very real issues of unregulated, lawless immigration policy; cavalier government taxation and frivolous spending; and the seemingly constant infringement of their Constitutional protections by well-connected special interests. These are things that effect people in their everyday lives, which is why no amount of racially charged name-calling by the Left or slick wordplay on the Right will make it all go away.
“Middle Tennesseans are smart, hard-working people who tell us they are sick of the cheap Kabuki theater that so much of politics have become and are instead interested in solutions and results that put them, as taxpaying citizens, first,” Botteri said.
“This is the platform President Trump ran on, and it’s the platform they expect him and all the other beneficiaries of their votes in November to deliver.”
“And frankly, they are raising their standards for media, too,” Botteri said. “Our readers can spot ‘Fake News’ coming from a mile away, and they are sick of it.”
“By contrast, our unique combination of breaking legislative news coverage, clear-eyed, in-depth analysis about politics and policy in Tennessee, plus our coverage of illegal immigration and refugee resettlement issues in a way not seen at all in other mainstream news outlets here in Tennessee puts us at a distinct advantage over the established, corporate-run mainstays.”
“Like I’ve said: our aim is to be the go-to, trusted platform for news, analysis and opinion in Tennessee. We’ve come a long way to meet that goal in a very short time – and it is all exhilarating and very humbling.”
[…] on February 6, The Star hit the 3 million visit mark on September 23. It took just 7 weeks and 6 days to add another 1 million visits and hit the 4 million visit mark […]