We ask every company we cover for its real numbers. It would be difficult to keep doing that while hiding our own. This page is the whole set - circulation, output, the sources behind it and the ledger - rebuilt with every edition. Where a figure cannot be computed it prints a dash rather than a zero.
Every figure here is Cloudflare's count, taken from its own beacon in the page. A view is a page loaded in a browser. A visit is an arrival from somewhere else, so a reader who opens three stories in one sitting is three views and one visit. Neither is a count of people, and the paper will not pretend otherwise. Both are a floor: a reader who blocks the beacon is not counted at all. How they are counted is at the foot of this page.
EVERY FIGURE IN THIS BLOCK IS FETCHED WHEN YOU OPEN THIS PAGE AND SHOWS A DASH IF THE
COUNTER BEHIND IT IS UNREACHABLE. CLOUDFLARE'S FIVE ARE READ THROUGH
/api/visits AND CACHED FOR A MINUTE, SO THEY CAN RUN THAT FAR BEHIND.
THERE IS NO ALL-TIME FIGURE BECAUSE CLOUDFLARE KEEPS A ROLLING WINDOW AND WE WILL NOT
INVENT ONE. A DASH MEANS WE DO NOT KNOW, NOT ZERO.
What this paper earns and what it costs to run, in full. Recurring lines accrue by completed calendar month, so nothing is counted before it is earned or spent.
KEPT BY HAND IN data/books.json. NOTHING GOES IN WITHOUT A RECEIPT
BEHIND IT. A DASH MEANS NOTHING OF THAT KIND HAS BEEN LOGGED YET, NOT ZERO.
FIGURES IN EUR.
What has actually been printed since the first edition.
The Sweep Report at the foot of every edition prints one cycle's denominator. This is the same count for the paper's whole life.
A COUNT OF WHAT OUR INGESTION WORKERS SAW, NOT A CLAIM THAT EVERY ITEM ON EVERY PLATFORM WAS SEEN. METHOD: /METHODOLOGY
How long the paper has kept its own schedule, and how much of the beat it holds a file on.
EVERY TRACKED NAME WITH TWO OR MORE MENTIONS HAS A PERMANENT CLIPPING PAGE. THE MOST COVERED IS AT /COVERED/TRUSTMRR
How the reader figures are counted
Opening a page makes one request to our own endpoint. The running totals are sixteen integers in a key-value store. For the five minute figure the endpoint invents a random token for that view, holds it for five minutes and then deletes it - the token is never sent to your browser, never reaches this page, and counting how many are still alive is how the figure is made. What that can measure is page views, so page views is what is printed above. It is not a count of unique readers and we will not relabel it as one. It also under-counts: the tally is written without a lock, so where two views collide one is dropped. A paper printing its own circulation should round down.
Two things this figure is not. It is not server traffic: the count is made by a script in the page, so anything that fetches the HTML without running it - crawlers, scanners, the bots that read the web for their models - never reaches the counter. The edge log for this site is many times the number above, and the number above is the one we believe. And until 26 August 2026 it was not even the whole site: the script was attached to the two pages that print the figure, so a reader who arrived on a story and left was never counted. It now runs on every page a reader can open. The figure steps up on that date because of that fix, not because of a surge in readers, and it would be worth nothing here if we let you assume otherwise.
The visit figures are not ours. They come from Cloudflare, which runs its own beacon in this page and counts a visit as a pageload that arrived from somewhere off this site. That is an arrival, not a person: reading four stories in one sitting is one visit, and coming back tomorrow from another link is another one. Cloudflare does not count unique humans either, and neither figure on this page should be read as a headcount. The two counters use different beacons over different windows, so they will not reconcile, and nothing here averages them or quietly relabels ours. There is no all-time visit figure because Cloudflare keeps a rolling window rather than the paper's whole life, and a dash in those two boxes means the analytics are unreachable or have collected nothing yet. Those two figures are fetched from Cloudflare when you open this page, cached for a minute, and lag by about as long again while Cloudflare ingests what its beacon sent - so they can run a couple of minutes behind the page views beside them, on top of counting a different thing.
How the money is counted
The ledger is a file kept by hand, because there is no billing system here worth querying and a numbers table nobody remembers to update is worse than an honest text file. Recurring lines accrue one completed calendar month at a time - a sponsor who paid on the first has not earned us anything by the third. Nothing goes in without a receipt behind it, and when the net is negative the page prints the negative.
Spotted an error in any of this? martynas@theindiepress.news - it goes in the corrections log like anything else we print.