In my wildest dreams, I never imagined this six years ago
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Six years ago today, we were born.
To be honest, we actually introduced EastIdahoNews.com to the world two months earlier but didn’t tell anyone we were around until July 1, 2015. There were five of us working here and that first day, 2,945 users visited our website giving us 5,601 pageviews.
For an idea of how things have changed, last month we had 1.2 million users with 9 million total monthly pageviews.
Never in my wildest dreams did I think EastIdahoNews.com would explode as it has. In those first few years, I went home many nights and told my wife that I wasn’t sure our news outlet was going to last. There were plenty of days where I was ready to throw up my hands and find a nice job selling snow cones on a beach somewhere.
But, thanks to you, our organization has been a massive success.
You’ve turned to us every day through the hard stories, the unbelievable stories (remember the bison in the trunk?), the fun stories, the weird stories and the heartbreaking stories. Sometimes our coverage may have upset you and we’ve made some mistakes along the way but hopefully we’ve been accurate, honest and a trustworthy force for good in eastern Idaho – and the world.
Earlier this week, Nate Sunderland, our managing editor who has been with us since the beginning, told me that EastIdahoNews.com is now the most visited local news website in all of Idaho. That’s according to Alexa, a global internet system that ranks millions of websites in order of popularity. They calculate their numbers by looking at the estimated average daily unique visitors and number of pageviews for a given website over the past three months. The lower your Alexa rank, the more popular your website is.
These numbers are impressive and, frankly, mind-blowing to me. All we can say is thanks.
Thank you for calling with story ideas, messaging news tips, downloading our app, stopping to say hi in the grocery store, sending us letters from all over the world and leaving hilarious comments on our Facebook page. Thank you for trusting us.
Over the past six years, we’ve won some awards, achieved national attention, interviewed famous people and done some cool things – but none of that matters if we aren’t bringing you consistent, reliable local news. We’ll continue to do so for the next six years and beyond.
Nate Eaton
EastIdahoNews.com News Director