It was exactly two years ago today that St. Louis Jazz Notes went online. Nearly 850 posts later, the site has been through some changes and improvements, but has remained true to my original goal of documenting what's going on in St. Louis with regard to jazz, creative music and improvisation.As a writer and reporter, I've enjoyed the experience. I've met some great people, had the chance to hear a lot of good music, and have learned many interesting things, some of which I surely would have missed if I hadn't started StLJN.
Equally important, the site has been well received by readers, at least by my admittedly modest standards. From a base of absolutely nothing two years ago, and with a promotional and marketing budget of $0, the average number of unique visitors per day has grown from month to month on a fairly consistent basis, albeit with some seasonal fluctuations along the way.
Most recently, since the beginning of 2007, the site has been getting between 130 and 140 unique visitors most days, with an average of 1.7 page views per visitor. Not long ago, StLJN topped 1,000 unique visitors in one week for the first time, and April, 2007 will be the site's busiest month ever.
Now, compared to any number of big Web sites you might want to mention, these numbers are still tiny. (For example, All About Jazz.com claims more than one million unique visitors each month.) However, I choose to interpret the consistent nature of StLJN's growth as an indication that there's definitely an audience out there for this sort of specific, local information, and the feedback I get from readers confirms that.
Many of you are simply jazz fans who want to know what's going on around town, but I have also heard from musicians, music students and educators, presenters, club owners, publicists, media people, record label employees and many others who read the site at least occasionally.
I thank you all for your emails, comments, ideas, suggestions and news tips, and, most of all, for your time and attention, and I look forward to another year of doing what I can to make St. Louis Jazz Notes a useful and entertaining resource. In the meantime, please feel free to use the comments for your "birthday" wishes & congratulations, suggestions, random jazz-related thoughts, and/or (if you must) complaints.
2 comments:
Thank you for taking on this "mission" to be a portal for jazz news. I get google alerts on my favorite jazz artists, and especially Russell Malone and Benny Green. Today, it was Russell. And I love the people at MAXJAZZ. What a great recording company. They are doing good things for their artists. All About Jazz continues to do amazing things also, but you have a unique place and audience, so to speak. I wish you the best. I am trying to find a place in jazz media myself sometime in the next couple of years, and St. Louis sounds like a great place to reloacte to possibly. Jazzy cheers! Kandie Webster in Washington State.
Congratulations and keep up the fantastic work! I look forward to Jazz in the STL area and it's difficult to find anywhere else. I would probably be able to make more of these Jazz events if I could subscribe to the events or calendar with iCal within Google Calendar and/or Apple iCal. Consider exporting Yahoo Calendar into Google just to check it out sometime... Beautiful tool!
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