Fast Facts on Bakersfield Social Networks

As I mentioned earlier, I'll be on a panel discussion at tomorrow's Networked Journalism Summit. People often ask me for numbers that indicate how well our sites are doing. Since the Californian is a privately held company and isn't required to release that kind of stuff, I often can't give anything out.

This time I received permission in advance to disclose some interesting stats that show the power of social networking, blogging and user-generated content in a local market. For context, Bakersfield has 330,000 residents -- so take that and the hyper-local focus of our efforts into account. (It ain't no New York City!)

• Our network of 9 Bakersfield-focused sites now generates 4.2 million monthly pageviews, and community and social networking make up at least 20% of that. (If you exclude Bakersfield.com and count only niche sites, the community traffic is 90-100% as the bulk of the content comes from users themselves).
• On Bakersfield.com in particular, community generates 20-25% of total trackable pageviews. As some of our features use Flash and Ajax which doesn't translate into pageviews, we believe the total number is probably a lot higher.
• Anyone in the community can have a user profile and blog through our sites. Since we started offering this 3 years ago, 26,000 users have created public profiles (8% of the Bakersfield population), and they have created 39,000 profile friend connections between each other. We haven't even begun to tap into the power of these connections and have a lot of ideas (for example, targeted promotion of self-serve advertising to friends of friends with shared interests).
• There have been 124,884 comments on blog postings along since we began offering blogging approximately 18 months ago.
• Much of the growth in community is coming from our niche community sites, such as Northwest Voice and Bakotopia. For example, 46% of profiles and 57% of blogs on the network are on the niche sites.

These brands transcend delivery mechanism, as most of our them have advertising-supported print components too. And one even has a CD! Here's a breakdown of our print circulation by brand:

The Bakersfield Californian
60,000 daily, 70,000 Sunday

Northwest Voice
28,000 every two weeks

Southwest Voice
28,000 every two weeks

Bakersfield Life
65,000 monthly

Tehachapi News
8,400 weekly
(For context, Tehachapi's population is 10,000, or 40,000 in the surrounding mountainous area.)

Mas
17,000 every week; 13,000 home delivered, 5,000 in racks

Bakotopia
10,000 every other week

You can view samples of some of our print publications here:
http://participata.com/printeditions.html