Afloat.ie thanks its 1.2m readers…

Afloat.ie is on course for another record year for visitors on its dedicated Irish boating website, with a 20% increase on 2016 figures.

The Irish sailing, boating and maritime website reached a high water mark a year ago, informing and entertaining a larger boating audience than ever before — and is now set to repeat that in 2017, too.

The latest statistics show unique visitors to the site are heading for 1.2 million.
Afloat’s popular online format has a strong returning readership, with half of daily visits being repeat readers.

Based on site analytics, 70% of traffic is from Ireland, with a good geographic spread across the Irish Sea and into the West Coast of Britain.

Nearly two-thirds (65+%) of Afloat.ie traffic is from mobile devices — an important return on investment in the mobile site by our journalist and developer team.

What’s more, the bounce rate (the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page) of 21% is well below the industry average of 40% to 60%, according to HubSpot.

And Afloat.ie’s high authority in the boating market means stories are indexed quickly by Google and other search engines, giving stories valuable reach.

It’s a testament not only to our tight 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 conversation on sailing, boating and maritime affairs.

The site’s readership has climbed consistently year on year since 2008. Last year marked the first time reader numbers broke the one million barrier, and now that figure is climbing even higher.

It shows that our mission to provide Irish sailing and boating clubs, classes and the wider maritime community with a comprehensive and reliable and independent platform, promoting our great sport to the wide audience only the internet provides, is truly working.

As we said earlier this year, this success would not be possible without our full–time marine journalists, our advertisers, supporters and web developers who are dedicated to promoting Irish sailing and boating.

Once again we express our many thanks to all our readers and advertisers for your continued interest in Afloat.ie.