Editorial
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Weather-wise this time of year feels like we’re turning a corner. It has been cold – relatively – the last few days and the Southern Hemisphere’s winter feels ready to break. I was lucky enough to spend a couple weeks in mid-August back home in Vermont with wonderful summer weather there, but I know that is about to turn a corner also as the fall winds come.
After three years we’re seeing trends develop with our Online readership, and that seems to be turning a corner also. The months of May, June and July were a little lower then expected as we came off of last year’s Carnival season, and the Rio+20 UN Conference was a big disappointment in terms of readership in June.
Then came August and the London Olympic Games, and the finals and closing ceremony turned into our most read weekend ever. This was very exciting and a big relief to see how the mega sporting events draw interest. Of course the spike was short lived but it brought a lot of new readers and some of them are staying with us.
Over the low Rio winter months our Online readership ratio changes to be about even amounts of people looking at the site from Brazil and the U.S. (about 32 percent each), and now what we see for August is the U.S. readers are now 36 percent and readers in Brazil are down to 26 percent. That indicates the huge population of English speakers living in the U.S. is our biggest variable.
So not only do we get a ripple effect of topic-specific interest spikes from the mega-events like the Olympics, but also the change of season in the Northern Hemisphere means people are starting to think about vacations and escaping the winter there. That works out because here if feels like people are ready to start thinking about (Rio’s) summer.
There was an article about the New Year’s party planning in O Globo this morning, and some references to Carnival season are already being whispered. That all sounds like good news to me, we’re ready it. Next thing we know it will be time to change our clocks and re-calculate time zones with the Daylight Savings Times.
