The SunBreak Turns One

Whew! That was fast. A year ago a few of us pushed off from the shores of Seattlest on our own little raft of words. 165,654 unique visitors and 413,021 page views later, we know a lot more about the people and places of Seattle than when we started, thanks to a staggering amount of arts & culture interviewing from Jeremy Barker and Tony Kay--and of eye-catching contributions to our Flickr pool, which now has 3,200 glimpses of Seattle life in it.

Our top two stories, according to Google Analytics, were "An Atheist's Defense of 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day'" and "Who Killed Belltown's McGuire? The Cast of Characters," the latter a story I lucked into when our hiking contributor John Hieger emailed me to say he'd gotten an odd note from his property manager.

Seth Kolloen (who's moving on to a life of even more sports) gave us a memorable, sometimes harrowing year in the life of a Seattle sports fan, while Audrey kept tabs on film and TV, especially Seattleites in film and TV, and Josh did everything humanly possible to introduce you to the work of Vincent Moon. We've just welcomed Constance Lambson for books coverage, and Jay Friedman of Gastrolust to our food section--and you'll soon see more on jazz and Paris living (for reasons I'll explain later), as we explore what it means to be a Seattle online magazine.

Seattle, Redmond, and Bellevue are our top cities for traffic. (Tacoma, Everett, Renton, and Portland are in the top 10.) A full 50 percent of our traffic came from Washington state. Who's visiting us? Top business/institutional addresses include Microsoft, UW, Amazon, RIM, Boeing, Costco, and King County and the City of Seattle.

For the stats nerds: Our leading referrer (besides Google) is Facebook. Our top two keywords (besides "the sunbreak" are "pearl jam" and "soundgarden." (That Seattle enough for you?) Firefox and IE visitors are neck-and-neck at 36 percent of visits each, with Safari at 18 percent and Chrome at eight. We've had 9,100 iPhone visits to 1,500 Androids (just wait 'til we get that Android app going).

Quantcast tells us that you, Gentle Reader, are slightly more likely to be male than female (56/44), and 70 percent of you are 35 and over. Over 80 percent of you have no kids at home, and about eight percent are Asian, which is about twice the internet average for the U.S. 65 percent of you report making $60,000 or more per year (35 percent say over $100,000)--and a whopping 25 percent of you smartypants have graduate school degrees.