Substance website has biggest day in history on May 21 with nearly 50,000 hits
The Substance website, www.substancenews.net, had the highest one-day traffic in history on May 21, with 584 unique visitors and 43,830 total hits during the one 24-hour period. Despite cyberattacks during April and early May 2010, SubstanceNews has surpassed previous highs. Ongoing glitches in the system (including the refusal of the website at times to accept credit card payments for subscriptions and donations) are being worked on and repaired as they are identified.
Www.substancenews.net also now has 319,000 hits for the month of May 2010, while the number of comments to Substance news and analysis articles now far surpasses any other news site dealing with public education in Chicago. The reasons, according to Substance staff and observers, is that Substance provides readers with original reporting, timely photographs and graphics, and a grass roots analysis that can't be found anywhere else. Most other sites addressing public education, at least in Chicago, are blogs where their administrators simply reprint "news" from corporate media sources and then launch blog comments on them. (Some sites deliberately ignore Substance on a regular basis).
Despite the potential for revenue from certain strange ads, Substance refuses to take ads from diploma mills and others that prey in the "education" field.
Substance has also decided not to milk Internet and Google prejudices by using lurid headlines (such as "Hot Honeys of the Canvassing Committee", which was suggested during the 2010 vote count) in order to draw mindless hits.
