The Lighthouse year in review – two million reasons to celebrate

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To quench our audience’s thirst for evidence-based news and comment, this year we published 193 new articles, explainers and videos, bringing 603,000 visitors to The Lighthouse.

This record number of visits – 100,000 more than last year – helped drive our overall traffic since launch in April 2018 through the two million mark – demonstrating once again there is a strong appetite for news our audience can trust.

Our time-on-page metric for the year is an enviable 10 minutes 36 seconds – proving our readers come to The Lighthouse for the story of the day, then stay for more.

Our top content of the year was an expert comment piece by education scholar Professor Garry Falloon. Published in May to coincide with significant media coverage on the growing number of boys’ schools opening their doors to girls, traffic hit over 22,000 in its first week with numbers steadily growing to hit 32,364 clicks by year’s end.

A story about a world-first clinical trial testing the effectiveness of psychedelics on moderate depression was the most popular research story of the year, and resulted in huge media coverage for Dr Vince Politio’s project.

Leaps in Alzheimer’s research, work on the newly identified internet gaming disorder, a study showing our worst beaches for microplastics and results of a two-year project showing how living seawalls promote regeneration in Sydney Harbour were the most popular projects we reported on in 2022.

For the second year in a row, explainer articles made up five of the top ten articles, with academic expertise tied to news of the day continuing to be a winning combination. Readers were eager to know why petrol is so expensive, while insights from Macquarie Law School and the Department of History and Archaeology satisfied reader curiosity about defamation and the centenary of Tutankhamun’s discovery.

Launching our new brand storytelling page MQ Life helped build a new audience by publishing a suite of content aimed at school-leavers and their parents. The new page also provides a place to tell the stories of our beautiful campus, our award-winning teachers and inspiring graduate success stories.

Our Leading Lights video interview series continued to go from strength to strength with CSIRO chief Dr Larry Marshall, world-famous Wiggle Anthony Field and mental health changemaker Lucy Brogden among the high-impact alumni partnering with us this year.

Take a look at our 2022 Lighthouse highlights video below and subscribe to our news emails here.

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