Weelunk’s First Month In Review

It has been a crazy month. Weelunk launched on November 1st, and right from the start you, our users, have amazed us with your enthusiasm, your words and pictures, and above all, your sheer numbers! We just can’t believe how many of you are out there.

Let’s have a look at some numbers. Between Nov. 1st and Nov. 30th, we had 135,937 pages viewed. I like to take that number with a grain of salt, because our moms are probably just sitting at home clicking around Weelunk all day. A more useful number is the unique visitors, which rang in at 45,638. Compare to the population of the entire Wheeling Metropolitan Statistical Area at about 150,000. However, this number gets clouded a bit when people access Weelunk from multiple devices, and there was also a lot of help from outside the Ohio Valley.

The majority, about two thirds, of our users do come from the Tri-state, with a breakdown of:
West Virginia: 15,635
Ohio: 8,406
Pennsylvania: 6,060

When we look at metro areas, New York was surprisingly strong. So strong, in fact, that there may be some anomaly at work. For example, Weelunk isn’t really that popular in Clarksburg, but if one connects via Frontier DSL, the Internet thinks you’re in Clarksburg.
Wheeling / Steubenville: 13,620
Pittsburgh: 5,389
NYC: 3,695
Clarksburg: 2,081
Columbus: 2,302

Far more of you connect via your phones than we initially expected. The device breakdown looks like:
Mobile: 65%
Laptop/Desktop: 21%
Tablet: 14%

Thirty-seven people browsed Weelunk via BlackBerry.

The most popular stories, in numbers of page views, were:
Roney’s Point: 18,954
Moondog: 9,397
DiCarlo’s: 5,198
I Moved Back On Purpose: 4,774
Elm Grove: 4,749

Facebook was a huge driver of traffic, and a great way for us to reach and communicate with new people. Our Facebook page received 3,211 Likes, from:
Wheeling: 1,575
St. Clairsville / Martins Ferry: 120
Morgantown: 90
Pittsburgh: 60

We also posted stories from 33 different contributing authors, or as we like to call them, Weelunkers.

Moving into December, we want to keep everyone coming back. To that end, we’ve got lots of great content in at least some stage of development, including:
– Stories of Wheeling Christmases Past, Present, and Future
– Some beautiful photo essays
– More neighborhood profiles
– Stories about Wheeling’s Victorian homes

We’re working on some improvements to the site itself, as well. In the next several weeks, look for:
– an improved Event Calendar (we put so many events in the original that it got a bit unwieldy)
– a phone app, to offer more features to our numerous smartphone users
– tighter Facebook integration, especially commenting

We hope you’ve enjoyed Weelunk so far. It seems like our mission has really resonated with people, and it has been so exciting to hear all of the positive things going on throughout the city and the entire Valley. The coming year is sure to be a special one, and we’ll be here to keep you posted as momentum builds in the New Wheeling.

And we want to hear more from you – contributions, comments on the many articles we post each day, and on social media. Our wish… our purpose… is to tell your story, so any assistance you would like to lend would be very much appreciated.

To submit content, inquire about our exclusive monthly advertising opportunities or to provide feedback please email: weelunk@weelunk.com

THANK YOU.