(BELMAR, NJ) -- Now that all of the numbers are in for 2020, New Jersey Stage takes a look back at a year unlike any other. Despite the arts world shutting down, New Jersey Stage's audience continued to grow. Like most in the arts, the site tried making the best out of a bad situation.
"The website had 350,000 unique visitors according to our Google Analytics," said Gary Wien, publisher of New Jersey Stage. "That's the number we use the most as we believe it's the most accurate. Our own web server numbers reported over 2 million unique visitors. Some websites use the highest number they can, but we know that web server data includes search engines that are removed from Google Analytics, so we prefer their numbers."
A quick look at the numbers shows that the website was nearly evenly split between men and women with 50.6% females versus 49.4% males. Three significant age groups had solid numbers. New Jersey Stage had 27% within the 18-34 age range; 32% within the 35-54 bracket; and 41% over 54. Most users visited New Jersey Stage via a mobile device (59.26%) with 36% on a desktop and 4.5% via a tablet.
"We began 2020 with high hopes," recalled Wien. "Our goal was to increase the audience to a million unique visitors. That goal changed in March when shows began being rescheduled - soon to be cancelled. We initially kept our events calendar online and rescheduled the events to their new dates. Once we noticed shows were being rescheduled two and three times, it was clear that no rescheduled date could be trusted. Covid was going to erase the rest of the calendar."
"It was around April that virtual shows began taking place," said Wien. "We quickly pivoted to change our events calendar into an online calendar with quick links to where shows were being broadcast. In the first three months of virtual shows, there were plenty of shows taking place every day across most of the arts. Since shows were available online and not limited to a geographic area, we began listing shows of interest from throughout the country. Unfortunately, that opened our events calendar up to hacking attempts from the outside world. Eventually, blocking the hackers became too much of a job for a one-man operation, so the calendar was removed entirely."
New Jersey Stage's event calendar was an important part of the website for years. It regularly brought about 1/3 of the audience to the site. Yet even without the calendar for 9 months and without the online calendar for half of 2020, the audience numbers remained stable.
The arts world being shut down also largely eliminated show previews and reviews from New Jersey Stage - both were significant parts of the site. Nevertheless, we still published 2,824 articles including 669 original pieces (features, interviews, reviews, columns, etc).
"The site did not receive the growth it sought to reach a million unique visitors, but kept pace with the year before," added Wien. "When you factor in the loss of event listings and event preview/review articles, it's rather remarkable that the audience numbers were as high as they were. It tells me we were due for a major jump towards one million unique visitors had covid not happened."
When shows were cancelled, New Jersey Stage stopped charging advertisers for ads. The site was always designed to be a partner with the arts and if venues and arts organizations could not make money from ticket sales, it didn't make sense to charge them. The goal became to help out the arts organizations as much as possible. The first step was setting up a page linking directly to the donation pages of over a hundred arts organizations.
The next step was putting out an offer of free advertising. Unfortunately, only a handful or arts organizations took us up on the offer which remained good throughout the year.
From April until September, New Jersey Stage continued to publish its monthly digital magazine. The publication was suspended with issue 75 when it became too difficult to come up with interesting article topics, too costly to produce without paid advertising, and facing a yearly production bill due in December. The future of the magazine is uncertain at this time.
In October, New Jersey Stage began a process to completely overhaul the website. Its design was changed to move more towards a mobile first design since that was where the majority of users were coming from. In addition, the site began running Google Ads in an effort to bring in some revenue.
"We never expected to run Google Ads, but it became a necessity," said Wien. "We are going to begin charging for ads again with a reduced rate to start. Our ad rates have always been among the lowest in the industry because we want advertising to be affordable for everyone in the arts. This reduced rate to start is because venues and arts organizations are still not able to make even a fraction of the revenue they could pre-covid. Our goal is to help provide marketing for their events and programs and help them get back to pre-covid numbers."
New Jersey Stage is currently setting up its editorial calendar for the year and has plenty of ideas for new columns, stories, and major areas of the website. Even with the challenges of covid still very much in play, the goal is to make 2021 the best year the site has ever had - with a structure built to withstand challenges such as those currently being face.
