The original Finfacts logo. The site was launched in March 1997.

Finfacts achieved record traffic in October 2008 -  - another month dominated by global financial turmoil.

Using data tracked by the Google AdSense program, which excludes spoof usage such as search engine spiders, our traffic will exceed 1.3 million page views at the end of October.

Web metrics are still an evolving area, with some data server-based while panel-based measurements are also popular.

A "unique visitor" is for example not a definitive concept but if we take a conservative average of 15 page views per month, we get 87,000 visitors.

The Wall Street Journal's wsj.com average is 9 page views per visitor in a month, while BusinessWeek magazine's average is 6.

The Financial Times says that each web user of its site is as valuable to the company as each print reader - due to the subscription fee and premium advertising the site attracts.

This is in great contrast to other newspaper sites, which can need to find between five and 20 web readers to replace each print reader and maintain revenue

Finfacts has built up a regular usage base that is a worthwhile target for advertisers.

Research carried out in Ireland earlier this year, showed that 51% of the 5,185 people surveyed never connect to the internet.

Behind, the official marketing hype, we Irish are indeed a very conservative people!

We launched in March 1997 and in the early years, the speed of Irish adoption of the web, was glacial compared with the knowledge economies that Ireland aspires to emulate, such as Denmark, Finland and South Korea.

We have never won an award, had the opportunity to cry at an "oscars" ceremony or had the ambition for fatuous accolades such as "digerati" or "net visionary."

Ireland has a small "establishment" elite and it's not uncommon for journalists to be part of the Taoiseach's (Prime Minister) drinking circle.

We aim to be independent in the positions we take.

Massaging the egos of politicians or polishing halos, is not our style.

While we don't beg for the baubles at the disposal of Ministers, such as the 8,000 board positions on 800 State agencies/quangos or the multiplicity of "expert" groups that are an inbuilt part of the political process of long-fingering, we always welcome advertising!

SalesOnline handles our advertising and can be contacted at : T: +353 (0)1 429 9353  |  F: +353 (0)1 429 9354

Finfacts can also be contacted directly here.