The team at MND has been working extremely hard — from around Mexico — to keep you updated and informed on what has been happening nationwide since the killing of cartel leader “El Mencho” yesterday morning.
We will continue to do so today and going forward, and as always, we will do so in a fact-based, fact-checked and bias-free manner.
Given that it was a truly unprecedented day for MND, I wanted to share some insight into how the day unfolded in our newsroom with those interested.
Just a few days ago, I was celebrating with our team our first-ever back-to-back “100k days.”
For two days in a row, we had over 100,000 people visiting our website and YouTube channel. As we celebrated the milestone and reflected on our momentum, I wondered out loud, could we break 2 million viewers this month? Then yesterday happened.
The day began in a normal way, with my wife and me going for a walk on Reforma Avenue in Mexico City (if you have never done that on a Sunday morning, when it is closed for traffic, I highly recommend it). We were in the city for business meetings and for the wedding of a friend the night before. As we strolled under the blooming jacarandas, we both agreed that it was one of the best weddings we had ever been to, and in fact, a truly epic day all around.
Returning to our hotel, we ordered an Uber to take us to the Northern Bus Terminal so we could catch our bus back to San Miguel de Allende. While en route to the station, we heard that the authorities had just shut down all bus services to Guerrero, Michoacán and Jalisco. “Hmmm,” we thought. As we pulled up to the station a few minutes later, there were stranded people standing around everywhere. We got out of the Uber and ran inside, only for the station’s employees to tell us that bus services to Guanajuato — and actually, everywhere — had been canceled a moment earlier. A certain sense of panic and fear filled the room.
We quickly jumped into another Uber and headed back to our hotel, hoping they would let us have our room back and stay another night or two. By now, our MND team chat was blowing up. Our Jalisco-based and Jalisco-born team members were passing on constant information and insight and began writing summaries of what was going on.
We then pulled together a group of 17 team members to get to work on a Sunday morning when none of them are normally working. Writers, editors, fact checkers, social media, marketing, technical and back office team members all dove into the details and the opportunity for MND to bring clear news and information about what was really going on.
In an effort to get the word out, we agreed to make all of our news stories related to the emergency free for all readers. Providing safety and reliable information during this time was, and continues to be, of utmost importance. We pulled the El Jalapeño article published earlier that day — it was not a day for satire or humor — and we all worked like never before.
Very quickly, we published our first article of the day and it became extremely popular — so much so that it completely crashed our site.
To give you some perspective, at one point, we had a surge of over 6,000 people trying to access our site IN ONE SECOND and had sustained bursts of traffic of over 100 site visits per second. We were able to very quickly get the site back up and running by shutting off some of the regular guardrails of our paywall service and our traffic was off the charts. We were getting over 150,000 people per hour reading our homepage.
We also quickly published our first YouTube video on the day’s events, which too went viral. Our most popular day ever on our YouTube channel was, until yesterday, around 20,000 video views in one day. Our first video published yesterday alone had over 500,000 views!
I am extremely proud of the 17 team members who made it all happen yesterday: on a Sunday, working from home, on a moment’s notice.
You can never really plan for something like what happened, and the MND team delivered. The traffic numbers are still coming in, but we reached our 2M visitors in one month goal, in just one day!
Today is a new day. It will most certainly be our second-highest traffic day ever. Our team is tired, but inspired. We have a new sense of energy and purpose. We were tested and we delivered. Yesterday made us all better.
You can count on us more than ever to bring you the news and information that you need to know about Mexico. Fact-based, fact-checked and apolitical.
Thank you for supporting our work. Onward.
Travis Bembenek is the CEO of Mexico News Daily and has been living, working or playing in Mexico for nearly 30 years.
