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Three Years Already?

A look back at the growth of the Alameda Post on our birthday

Three years ago today, I published the first post to alamedapost.com. At the time, I was the chair of Alameda’s Public Art Commission. Rule #1 of writing is to write what you know, so that first post was celebrating two new pieces of public art in the city—the Calimar sculpture next to the WETA building at Alameda Point, and the Webster Gateway mural at the corner of Pacific Avenue.

Alameda Post - a graphic of Alameda Post publisher Adam Gillitt holding a birthday cake, with balloons in the background

I last provided a look at our accomplishments on our first anniversary in 2022, and it’s amazing to look back upon our remarkable growth since then. As of this morning, we have published more than 2,500 articles to our website, 142 issues of our weekly newsletter (still with about a 60% opening rate) and 136 episodes of our weekly podcast.

Content

During 2024, we published nearly one hundred articles per month—just over 1,100 in total—from eight dozen different authors. Several new writers joined our staff, including feature writer Jean Chen, general assignment reporter Vicky Nguyen, and sportswriter Gabe Caraballo. We added a lot of new content to our roster, increasing the range and variety of topics we cover. We feature an adoptable pet of the week from the Friends of the Alameda Animal Shelter every Saturday morning. And we became custodian of Jeff Smith’s weekly math puzzle that used to run in the Sun, providing brain teasers and ice cream to math lovers. We also added real estate listings and insight from Liz Rush, sharing the details of properties sold around Alameda.



On article pages, we now include a box with links to content related to the current post, and a box with California news stories curated by KQED. And we upgraded our community events calendar, switching to a service provided by CitySpark that delivers many more and richer event listings. Now, our calendar includes events from outside Alameda, and it also allows those who post to promote their events and reach a wider audience. The calendar page is consistently among the top five viewed pages on our site. It’s become so popular and well-used that we started publishing a column every Thursday from Amanda Laird that recommends events for the coming week.

Alameda Post - A list of five articles including an article about tube closures, Jolibee, Shaka Shack, woodstock the boat, and bike lanes
The Alameda Post’s most viewed content on Facebook.
Alameda Post - the analytics for numbers of podcast downloads per month
Podcast downloads per month over time, to date as of publishing.

Analytics

This year, traffic to our website was impressive, with nearly 500,000 active users—nearly double our 2023 traffic, and four times our 2022 traffic. We now see an average of more than 40,000 unique visitors to the site each month, with two months this year seeing over 60,000. Our biggest surge in traffic came between November 25 and 27, when in just 72 hours we received over 85,000 unique visitors, drawn by our article about the opening of Alameda Housing Authority voucher waitlist. As you can see, we have been successful in optimizing our site for discovery in searches. Results from the Alameda Post were displayed for over 6.8 million impressions on Google Search, and another 540,000 impressions on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.

We will publish a roundup of the top stories of 2024 soon, but for now I want to highlight some of the biggest articles of the year. Ken Der’s report about the Grand Street property that is literally underwater was picked up by all the local newspapers and TV stations. Our post that the Alameda Housing Authority was going to open up the voucher waiting list turned out to be our most popular story of all time—by a huge amount. Our roundup of candidates running for California State Assembly, District 18, in 2024 drew a lot of traffic from search. And our other election coverage, including live returns and candidate forums, drove a lot of traffic to the site as well. Surprisingly, two articles from previous years, one about red-tailed hawks by Rick Lewis, and the other a recipe to make fake blood for Halloween by Scott Piehler were among the top five most popular results for our site in Google search for 2024.

Our efforts to make Alameda news available everywhere people look for their news are paying off. In addition to search impression and website traffic, we did very well with our outside news aggregators this year. We had just under 890,000 impressions, and over 127,000 article views on Apple News, and we did even better with NewsBreak, where we had over 9 million impressions and nearly 400,000 article views. Plus, we received another 30,000 article views via SmartNews, MSN, and Google News.

We also found an audience via our social media channels. On Facebook, the Alameda Post account has 3,164 followers, and our 1,300 posts reached over a million people during the year, while our staff account has another 1,400 friends. Our other accounts also received similar traffic. Our posts were viewed over 360,000 times on Instagram, where we have 2,947 followers. Instagram also drove 18,250 users to our Linktr.ee and SmartBio accounts, where those users can click through to our stories. BlueSky followers jumped by a factor of 10 after the election when others quit Twitter/X, and we now have over 1,500 accounts following ours. We’re almost at 1,000 followers on Threads, with another 265 followers on Mastodon, and 286 members of our SubReddit.

Unsurprisingly, most of our traffic continues to be on mobile devices, by about a factor of 2 to 1 over desktop and laptops, while few people view our content from a tablet like an iPad. And most of our traffic is local, either directly from Alameda or around the Bay area (it’s difficult to determine precise numbers because the location of the traffic source is usually regional).

Alameda Post - Dennis Evanosky, who will lead the Alameda Walks tours, holds up a map on a tour and speaks in his portable headset microphone
Dennis Evanosky leads a history walking tour near one of Alameda’s lagoons in February 2023. Photo Adam Gillitt.

Staffing and business

Probably the most significant change we made to our staffing came in August, when we hired Kelsey Goeres to become the managing editor. She had already been reporting for us for almost a year and bringing her on to manage the editorial team has improved our processes and content in addition to freeing up a lot of my time to focus on being the publisher and taking care of the business. Kelsey has been doing a great job making fair and tough editorial decisions and supporting copy editor Liz Barrett and content manager Amanda Laird. Kelsey’s leadership is making the Post a better, more accurate, and discerning publication.

This year has also been focused on shoring up our business. Our launch back in 2021 was pretty quick—about six weeks from idea to publishing our first article. That meant that many things that are important to the business were rushed, done wrong, or not done at all. So, during 2024, I have been working to make sure the business will continue for many years to come. Some of the steps I have taken were engaging with a new accountant who specializes in nonprofit bookkeeping, securing media insurance to protect us against litigation, and consulting with HR specialists to set up payroll. Starting in 2025, we will have created six jobs for Alameda’s workforce! We are also working on a new site design that will debut in the new year.

Our history walking tours, led by historian Dennis Evanosky, were quite popular again this year. More than 650 people attended, and we raised over $13,000. We’ll be publishing the schedule for 2025 tours shortly after the new year begins. Advertising brought in more than $16,500, but that amount is about 15% the revenue seen by local newspapers just a few years ago, illustrating why we don’t rely on that revenue to sustain us.

Alameda Post - a graphic of a piggy bank

Fundraising

Another area where we saw a huge increase in our success was fundraising. Our readers have continued to be generous with their support. To date this year, we have received contributions from more than 500 donors, and of those, nearly half gave for the first time in 2024. One contributor, Jeff Atwood, donated more than $5,000 during the year, and deserves special thanks for his kind support.

Right now, we are conducting our year-end fundraising drive. As a part of NewsMatch, all contributions up to $1,000 are matched up to a total of $15,000 from now until December 31. However, for the first time this year, we were able to secure an additional $10,000 in local matches thanks to the generosity of RADIUM Presents, Alice Home Care, Greer Family Mortuary, and Realtors® Liz Rush and Joe LoParo. As I am preparing this article, we have raised over $21,000 toward our total goal of $30,000.

We had further success this year with grants, receiving significant support from local businesses, including Embarc dispensary, The Port of Oakland, the Alameda Kiwanis Foundation, and Alameda Municipal Power. Another Bay Area foundation made a remarkable $25,000 donation but requested anonymity, so we are unable to thank them directly. And, just this week, we received a contribution of more than $5,000 from the Richard C. Graham Family Charitable Foundation.

I participated in two different programs this year, each of which brought in $20,000 grants. The first was a sustainability audit from Local Independent Online News Publishers, who worked directly with us to assess our organization, our needs, and our deficiencies, and created a specific action plan we have been implementing, including hiring our managing editor and taking other steps to ensure the staying power of the business. The second program was offered by the Google News Initiative in cooperation with the Institute for Nonprofit News, and focused on audience development, and revenue generation from readers and advertising. Some of those suggestions have already been incorporated into our website and more will come with the new year’s redesign.

Although we were turned down for other opportunities, my optimism has increased that we will be selected in future cycles. As I heard from one administrator when I was being debriefed on why we were not accepted to their program at the beginning of this year, “You need grants to get grants.” We got grants in 2024!

Alameda Post - Our entry into the 2024 July 4th Parade. Photo by Maurice Ramirez.
The Alameda Post participated in the 2024 Alameda July 4th Parade. Photo by Maurice Ramirez.

What’s next?

This has been an amazing year for growth for the Alameda Post, for our content, our traffic, our staff, our business, and our fundraising. It’s gratifying to me to see that we are on a steady upward trajectory in all areas, with no plateaus yet in sight. And we’re not going to stop anytime soon. I have identified many areas to further develop in 2025—some obvious and others less so—including more fundraising, business and community outreach, more content, and a refreshed and renewed website. Most of all, I hope we can add more writers and reporters so we can provide better, deeper, and more timely coverage of the issues and stories that matter most to Alameda.

I cannot thank all of you enough who have made this dream real. Thank you to all the wonderful writers and photographers who have contributed your amazing content. Thank you to all the staff who keep this engine running. Thank you to all our generous donors and advertisers. And, most of all, thank you for reading and sharing our content and helping to keep Alameda informed. I may have started the ball rolling, but it’s now a group effort, which makes me so happy! I could not have done any of this without your time, funding, energy, and support, and for that, I am deeply humbled and grateful.

Adam Gillitt is the Publisher of the Alameda Post. Reach him at [email protected]. His writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Adam-Gillitt.


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