As regular readers of the page know, I've been considering getting rid of the daily news for quite a while. Honestly, I've been pondering it, off and on, for years. Why? Because it takes a lot of time to prepare, it doesn't draw links, and I've always suspected that the overwhelming majority of RWN readers don't even look at it.
Well, recently after bringing the subject up again, I got my tech guy, Danny Carlton, to prepare a script that allowed me to actually see how many clicks each news item was getting per day. That turned out to be a real eye opener.
For one thing, overall, the links weren't getting clicked that many times. For example, yesterday Conservative Grapevine had far more items clicked on than the daily news did and that's despite the fact that RWN had nearly 7 times as much traffic as CG yesterday.
Another thing to keep in mind is that something like 80% of the most clicked links came out of the columns and left-overs section. The average domestic and foreign news link? There were exceptions, but most of them were clicked only about 30-40 times over the course of a 24 hour period.
So, after much thought, I've decided to dump the daily news and start adding columns and left-over type links to Conservative Grapevine, to go along with the links to blogs that are currently carried on the page.
What that means is that Conservative Grapevine will be improved and I'll have more time to write posts for Right Wing News. Hopefully, that will mean that there will be an increase in the amount of content on RWN on a daily basis.
Now, I realize not everybody is going to be happy with this change, but I put an enormous amount of thought into it and concluded this was the right move to make. It'll hopefully mean more content for the majority of RWN's readers, who aren't fans of the daily news and yet, daily news fans can still head over to CG and read the most popular parts of the daily news over there each day. It may not be the perfect solution, but I think it's the best one possible given the circumstances.
