Happy Fourth Birthday To Us!

MyVeronaNJ.com was supposed to have been unveiled to the world of Verona (and beyond) at Fair In The Square in December 2009. But it snowed that day and the Fair was cancelled. We still think of the Fair as our birthday and since today is the Fair, we’d like to tell you how far we have come since 2009.

• We’ve published 5,586 stories
• We’ve had 381,034 unique visitors from every country on the planet
• Together, it means we’re just shy of 2.1 million pageviews

In the beginning, people read us from their desktop or laptop computers. Now, a rather large percentage read us from a smartphone or tablet. We’re not going to say how large (it would freak out the competition), but it is large enough–and growing–that earlier this year we became the first news site in New Jersey to use technology that automatically reformats our stories and ads to fit whatever device you’re using to read us.

We are insanely happy that we continue to have a very loyal audience: Almost 60% of our readers come back to the site regularly. But we get new readers every day from among the people who live in Verona, the people who want to live in Verona and the people who used to live here but still think it’s home. Women and men, from teenagers through seniors. They read about sports, schools and real estate, and a whole bunch of topics that we probably didn’t think Verona would be interested in when we started the site.

Over our first four years, we’ve told you about some of the really cool people who live here, Verona’s history, and the things that are shaping Verona’s future. We’ve told you about the friends and neighbors who have passed away, and a few moments when Verona wasn’t on its best behavior. We’ve put some of the top headlines in the poll below; if you guess which one was the most-read story since 2009, we’ll give you one of our fabulous “I Love MyVeronaNJ.com” t-shirts.

[polldaddy poll=7625700]