Dear Reader,
Because of your and our other supporters' generous backing, Afloat.ie has had another record year for visitors, with a significant 13% increase on 2020 figures.
Our website dedicated to Irish sailing, boating and maritime issues reached another high watermark, informing and entertaining a larger boating audience than ever before, and is now set to repeat that as we head into 2022.
The latest statistics show unique visitors to the site are over 1.9 million — an unprecedented number in what remains a challenging climate for online media.
Afloat remains by far the most popular boating website with Irish readers.
The 2021 statistics for Afloat readership show unique 'visitors' to the site (top) and (above) the number of 'actions' (or 'hits') of those visitors.
Ironically, despite the challenges in 2020 and 2021 with event cancellations due to COVID, interest in our boating and marine stories increased, which is reflected in many sections of the site. Afloat's popular online format has a strong returning readership, with nearly half of daily visits being repeat readers, and with strong social media engagement across our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram channels.
Based on analytics, 75% of our traffic is from Ireland, with an excellent geographic spread across the Irish Sea and into the west coast of Britain.
Most encouragingly, nearly two-thirds (65+%) of Afloat.ie traffic now comes from mobile devices — an essential return on investment in the mobile site by our journalist and developer team.
What's more, our website bounce rate (the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page) of 22% is well below the industry average of 40% to 60%, according to HubSpot.Together, those numbers make a strong argument for Afloat.ie growing as the go-to resource for an engaged audience with sailing, boating and marine interests.
Our high authority in the boating market is reflected, too, in Google and other search engines indexing of our stories, giving them valuable reach beyond our core readership.
All of this is a testament not only to our tight-knit and active community of readers, but also Afloat.ie's combination of opinion, hard news and features, which puts it at the very heart of the national — and increasingly international — conversation on sailing, boating and maritime affairs.
This year's growth is the sixth consecutive year of increase since the site broke the one million readers marked in 2015.
It's proof positive that our mission — to provide Irish sailing and boating clubs, classes and the wider maritime community with a comprehensive, reliable and independent platform promoting our great sport to the wide and connected audience only the internet provides — is genuinely working.
This success, as we've said before, would not be possible without our full–time marine journalists and web developers, and indeed our advertisers and supporters who are dedicated to promoting Irish sailing and boating. Progress, as we have achieved to date, would not have been achievable without it.
Thanks to your support, however, we have not resorted to putting our content behind a paywall like other news websites — because we want to keep our marine journalism open to the widest possible audience, which we believe is one of the keys to our growth. The figures bear this out.
Wishing you the best for 2022
Stay safe
The Afloat team
