Times of San Diego was read by 207,771 people in April, a 12 percent increase from the same month last year and up 40 percent from April 2016.
Widely read news articles in April included a jury’s award of $5 in damages in Rebecca Zahau’s death, venture capitalist Tim Draper’s ballot initiative to split California into three states, and the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson’s return to San Diego after a Pacific Ocean deployment.
Data from Google Analytics showed that the audience of the independent local news website — now in its fifth year — continued to be young, mobile and local.
Readers aged 25 to 34 made up the largest audience segment, and a full 50 percent of readers were under the age of 45. The youth of Times of San Diego’s audience contrasts with the significantly older audiences for local print and broadcast media.
Smartphones accounted for 52 percent of reading sessions in April, with traditional desktops and laptops at 40 percent and the remaining 8 percent of sessions on tablets. The Times of San Diego website is designed to automatically resize for different screens, and is also optimized for smartphones through the Google-backed Accelerated Mobile Pages project.
Readers in the City of San Diego comprised 30 percent of sessions, followed by readers elsewhere in San Diego County at 15 percent and elsewhere in Southern California at 9 percent. The remaining readership was national and even international, reflecting interest in the Navy and San Diego’s business and higher education.
Times of San Diego’s staff of six contributing editors and photographers publish an average of 20 articles daily about all aspects of life in San Diego and Southern California, including politics, crime, business, arts, sports, education, science and the military. A free email newsletter with the previous day’s top stories is delivered at 8 a.m. daily.
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