August is generally a slow month for news, but ARLnow saw the highest readership since the height of the pandemic.
The site recorded 1,542,873 pageviews for the month of August, according to Google Analytics. That’s the highest readership in three years, following a massive readership spike in the first half of 2020. Our all-time record remains 2.5 million monthly views at the beginning of the pandemic.
Our sister sites also had strong months, each near record post-pandemic readership levels. ALXnow saw nearly a half million monthly views in August and FFXnow — along with its subsites in Reston and Tysons — recorded about 625,000 views.
Despite the very real struggles in the local news business — primarily tied to the secular decline of print-based business models — ARLnow and its locally-owned, Arlington-based parent company remains modestly profitable. ARLnow gets most of its revenue through local advertising but is also supported by readers via the ARLnow Press Club.