YOUR Harlow has just broken through the five million page new barrier.

It has been a busy year as we keep residents up to date with what is happening in our rapidly expanding town.

YH has been running for ten years and has seen our audience steadily grow.

2014: 300,769

2015: 255, 920

2016: 503,800

2017: 705, 454

As we have been running Your Thurrock since 2008, it was after 2017 that we committed to increasing the number of stories each and every day for Harlow.

With the Harlow Citizen closing in 2007; the Harlow Herald in 2010 and the Harlow beginning a decline that would see it close in 2019, we felt it the time was right to step up the pace.

Sure enough in 2018, we got:

2018: 1,482,769

2019: 2,808,082

Things changed in 2020. The Covid year. We committed to keeping residents informed as best we could. In the end, we produced over 2,500 stories on that subject alone. Our audience grew massively but we do consider the year something of an outlier.

2020: 5,785,356.

Strangely enough, on New Years Eve 2020, we did say that we hoped to get fewer readers! Hoping that out captive audience woul don’t be in lockdowns.

Sure enough:

2021: 4,601,590

2022: 4,417,237

Over the last three years, we have consistently produced around 4,000 stories and have seen our social media platforms expand. We now have over 15,000 followers on Twitter. That’s effectively 20% of the population of Harlow.

So we are delighted to have hit 5 million page news this year and we still have seven weeks to go.

Thanks for looking in and supporting our digital newspaper.

Michael Casey

November 2023.