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Greaterlongisland.com, Long Island’s fastest-growing news source, tallied over 6.6 million pageviews in 2023 — a 43 percent jump in user traffic from 2022, Greater Long Island Media Group announced today, Jan. 1.
Total visitors to the website in 2023 reached over 4.8 million, internal data shows.
“Our numbers are starting to rival even some of the most financially backed local and regional media outlets in the country,” said website publisher Mike White, pointing specifically to Axios’s flagship local news website in Charlotte, N.C. The Cox Enterprises’ majority owned Axios Charlotte does about 1.3 million pageviews per month.
“Yet this isn’t Cox Enterprises, with billions of dollars at its disposal,” White said. “This is a small team of local, dedicated and seasoned storytellers scraping this thing together each and every day — in our own style.”
Scraping it together to the tune of nearly 600,000 pageviews every month in 2023.
Another 43 percent traffic jump for greaterlongisland.com in 2024 would amount to about 9.4 million pageviews over the course of this coming year, or 780,000 per month on average.
Pageviews aside, White shared some of the company’s key goals for 2024:
- Expand coverage with an emphasis on the idea of truly covering Greater Long Island, in the geographic sense. That is, cover stories not only from Long Island but also its surrounding cities and states, to better inform the site’s core Long Island audience of regional news.
- Launch a banner ad-free app with a very modest monthly subscription cost for subscribers.
- Embark on more video storytelling projects, such as this one and this one.
- Grow subscriptions to Greater Long Island’s weekly newsletter and YouTube channel, as well as increase the followings on X, Instagram and Facebook. (Of course!)
- Beef up the site’s suite of sponsored local guides to best serve advertisers looking to engage our growing audience, while also informing and entertaining readers. Click here to submit an advertising inquiry. Click here for an example of a sponsored guide. (Or simply Google ‘Best Long Island Brunch.”)
- Undertake more enterprising and investigative journalistic pieces moving forward.
- Write more engaging columns and opinion pieces, while still steering clear of partisan politics.
“Passion is key for us here at Greater Long Island,” added Nick Esposito, Greater Long Island’s editorial director. “We love what we do. We’re good at it. And we’re having fun reporting local news in ways we deem entertaining and responsible. The philosophy here has always been about constructive news reporting. We are fully committed to that.”
The company is also committed to not utilizing a paywall for paid access to greaterlongisland.com content, now and in the future.
“A lot of local businesses benefit greatly from the coverage we provide; our news stories need to remain free for maximum exposure, as well as for a better informed audience,” Esposito said.
Top: Babylon’s annual Fall Harvest Festival in the village in October. (GLI file photo/Michael White)
