How STAT News readership exploded in 2020

Luke Winkie of Nieman Lab writes about STAT News, the Boston-based health care news site where readership grew exponentially in 2020.

Winkie writes, “Last February, the site tripled its metrics to 4.7 million monthly unique visitors. By March, as it proved clear that the pandemic would be the only news story that mattered for quite some time, that number ballooned to a mind-boggling 23 million. Ad sales remained ‘really strong’ throughout the year, said Macaulay, who goes as far to say that June was the company’s ‘biggest month in the history of the brand.’ The days of insularity — when Stat catered primarily to people who already knew what AstraZeneca was long before the clinical trials — are extinct. It’s a media triumph, in the middle of a generation-altering event.

“‘Stat has changed forever after last year,’ said executive editor Rick Berke, who mentioned that the website’s monthly visitors have plateaued to around seven million. ‘As a media company, we were on a good trajectory before the pandemic. But there’s no going back to the pre-pandemic reach that we had.’

“‘Our Chartbeat dial went past the maximum. It went all the way around again,’ said managing editor Gideon Gil. ‘That’s when we realized that we were in a new world.'”

Read more here.