Honderddertigduizend bezoekers voor het Cultureel Persbureau in 2011. De lat voor 2012 ligt hoog.

That frightens us quite a bit ourselves. We knew that the Cultural Press Agency was doing pretty well, but we didn't really think a reach of more than 100,000 people was possible. After all, we had done nothing in the way of marketing. Just posting content and not giving away free tickets. And only once something with a bare female breast in it.

Enfin.

For a website dedicated exclusively to journalistic coverage of culture, we are not doing badly at all. We just give the numbers. So below. Couple of striking trends: our top nine best-read stories consist entirely of news stories. Logical, you might say, but for a site that was still mainly focused on reviewing art in 2010, such figures are instructive. You, the reader, are simply more interested in hard news, and with traditional media increasingly abandoning it, you know how to find your way to us. For that, we are happy and grateful.

Soft euros

Who is also happy is politics. Though given the nature of our coverage, you might not say so. After all, we followed them rather annoyingly, the ladies and gentlemen in The Hague. We received 90,000 euros of subsidy (not tax money, but paid from the interest on the broadcasting reserve) for that this year, and earned about 20,000 euros ourselves, mainly thanks to the Online Festival Day newspaper De Dodo, which we produced in collaboration with a number of larger festivals. Just under a euro cost per visitor, in other words. The Netherlands Opera could learn a thing or two from that.

Now strange things happen with money from The Hague, and the strangest thing is that it often runs out just like that. So too with that broadcasting reserve. Gone. So is interest: gone too. Now the dodo is often extinct, but we actually wanted to make sure that this dodo at least makes it to the temporary end of the world. In other words. How are we going to survive 2012. A year in which the entire art world is going to be turned upside down, in which art institutions will start twisting themselves into very strange shapes in order to curry favour with subsidisers and politicians will start doing strange things to keep their electorate afloat, or cut back even more than they are already doing.

We are of course going to be there, also volunteering, but for good journalism, a little bit of funding is also useful.

Hard euros

So now, before we start asking you all for a tenner, here's what you yourself would be willing to do to keep the cultural press office and its derivatives going? And then, of course, as an equally important question: what would you want in return?

We'll see you response with great excitement.

Now come our figures.

Cultural Press Agency: Total visitors since 1-1-2011: 84,000, averaging three minutes per page visit.

Festival day newspaper The Dodo: covered four festivals, been active for a total of 40 days: 19,000 visitors, who spent an average of 2 minutes on each page.

YouTubekanaal: 12,143 video views.

Top 4:

Une Flute enchanté by Peter Brook. (1400 viewers)

Laura van Dolron on Sartre Says Sorry (960 viewers)

Mark Rutte's Minute on Art (950 viewers)

Savion Glover visits Springdance 2011 (900 viewers)

Other media:

Our Liveblogs as of June 2011, 2096 page views, >15,000 visitors on coveritlive.

Twitter: 4860 followers culture press, 670 followers de_dodo

Facebook: 4455 likes for 'Uranja from Culture Press', 382 for The Dodo