Access Media Group | Healthcare Publishers

50 Million Visitors Served in 2016

San Diego, Calif., January 12, 2017 — AllAboutVision.com served a record 50,080,875 unique visitors in 2016, measured weekly by Google Analytics. Website visitors viewed almost 75 million pages during the year; the average time spent on a page was 4 minutes and 35 seconds.

AllAboutVision.com's top content sections in 2016, ranked by number of page views, were:

Contact Lenses
Eyeglasses
LASIK & Vision Surgery
Cataracts
Pink Eye

The site's LASIK & Vision Surgery section - which was #5 on this list in 2015 - experienced the most growth, with a 19% increase in visitor sessions.

Access to the site with mobile devices continued to increase, with mobile users representing 58% of total users, compared with 52% in 2015. AllAboutVision.com consistently gets high marks for mobile friendliness and page speed from test sites such as Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom.

AllAboutVision.com's editors added 40 new articles to the site in 2016; several made the site's top 50 pages for the year. Topics included corneal abrasions (728,301 views), burning eyes (584,294 views), and hazel eye color (526,183 views).

Google continues to be the leading source of traffic for AllAboutVision.com. Google referrals were up 8%, while Facebook referrals increased 37%.

AllAboutVision.com Debuts Spanish Translations

San Diego, Calif., August 23, 2016 — AllAboutVision.com, the leading source of patient education about eye health and vision correction on the Web, has published 17 Spanish-language translations of articles in its Conditions & Diseases content section. The articles are the first translated articles to appear on the site, and focus on several of the most-searched common eye problems, conditions and diseases.

The United States has 41 million native Spanish speakers plus 11 million who are bilingual, according to the global non-profit Cervantes Institute. Only Mexico has a larger Spanish-speaking population than the United States.

The new section section contains the following articles:

Additional translated articles are planned for the site in the near future.

Essilor Acquires AllAboutVision.com

San Diego, Calif., June 24, 2016 — AllAboutVision.com, the leading source of patient education about eye health and vision correction on the Web, has been acquired by Essilor of America, Inc. AllAboutVision.com will continue to operate as an independent entity in a newly formed, California-based company wholly owned by Essilor. The website's entire team remains in place, and its business model is unchanged.

"The cornerstone of AAV's value to visitors and advertisers lies in our philosophy of trustworthy, unbiased, up-to-date, easy-to-understand content," said Tom Meinert, an Access Media Group partner. "Our central focus remains serving consumers who seek us out for reliable information, and in putting them first, we will continue to provide consistent value to our advertisers."

AllAboutVision.com will continue to serve a diverse, competitive set of advertisers, including Essilor. Existing advertising contracts remain in place, and the site will continue to seek new advertisers in all relevant product categories.

45 Million Visitors Served in 2015

San Diego, Calif., January 5, 2016 — AllAboutVision.com served a record 45,983,533 unique visitors in 2015, measured weekly by Google Analytics, for a 66% increase in visitors over 2014.

Website visitors viewed a total of more than 69 million pages during the year; the average time spent on a page was 4 minutes and 47 seconds. More than 1.8 billion image and web page files were served from AllAboutVision.com's web server and content delivery network (CDN), which provides fast downloads for visitors by serving files from eight U.S. locations as well as London, Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.

Slightly more than half of visitors access the site on phones. Google rates AllAboutVision.com's mobile version a 99 (out of 100) for "user experience," and time-on-page and click-through numbers often exceed corresponding desktop statistics. The mobile site launched in May 2012.

Drs. Adler, Dugel Join Advisory Board

San Diego, Calif., November 9, 2015 — AllAboutVision.com has added two highly respected ophthalmologists to its Editorial Advisory Board.

Richard Adler, MD, is a board-certified ophthalmologist and corneal specialist at Belecara — a multi-specialty practice in Baltimore that offers ophthalmology, plastic surgery and dermatology — where he also performs laser vision correction. Additionally, Dr. Adler is an assistant professor at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and he is affiliated with St. Joseph Medical Center, University of Maryland.

Pravin Dugel, MD, is managing partner at Retinal Consultants of Arizona and a founding member of Spectra Eye Institute. He is also a clinical professor, USC Eye Institute, Keck School of Medicine, at the University of Southern California. He has authored more than 200 papers and 35 book chapters and serves on the editorial board of several major medical journals.

"Our hands-on Board has been an essential component of developing more than 500 pages of comprehensive, reliable information," said Tom Meinert, a partner in Access Media Group, publisher of the site. "We're honored to add two individuals who can help us to further elevate the quality of education we provide to eye care consumers."

AAV Leveraging Increased Mobile Use For Success

San Diego, Calif., July 27, 2015 — While many websites have struggled to deal with an increase in visitors using mobile devices, AllAboutVision.com has successfully transitioned to this new reality and is providing value to both visitors and advertisers.

AllAboutVision.com's mobile site debuted in May 2012, and both the desktop and mobile versions of the site were redesigned this year to optimize the visitor experience. (Only phone users see the site's mobile version; desktop, laptop and tablet users all see the usual version of the site.)

Of note, according to Google Analytics:

56% of visits to AllAboutVision.com are now on phones
Google rates the site a 97 (out of 100) for "mobile user experience"
"Time on page" is higher for mobile users, 5:50 vs. the site average of 4:49 (minutes:seconds)

"Delivering a great experience is a challenge on a tiny screen," says Liz Segre, AllAboutVision.com Editorial Director. "But the numbers indicate that our visitors are happy with our approach."

27 Million Visitors Served in 2014; 40 Million Expected in 2015

San Diego, Calif., January 7, 2015 — AllAboutVision.com educated more than 27 million unique visitors in 2014, measured weekly by Google Analytics, for a 41% increase in visitors over 2013.

Based on current levels of visitor traffic, the website will serve 40 million visitors this year.

AllAboutVision.com's growth is particularly evident when comparing the first half of 2014 to the second half. Visitor sessions doubled, going from about 10 million to 20 million. Page views doubled as well, rising from 14 million to 28 million.

"Not only did we serve many more visitors in the second half of last year, but the quality of those visits increased," said Liz Segre, AllAboutVision.com editorial director. "In the first half of the year, the average time a visitor spent on a page was three minutes and 15 seconds. In the second half, that increased to four minutes and 50 seconds, a 47 percent increase."

Search engines account for about 90% of the visitors to AllAboutVision.com, with the top sources of traffic being Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com and AOL. Of visitors who did not arrive via search engines, Facebook was the dominant referrer, sending more than 100,000 visitors to the site.

Liz Segrè Joins OWA Board

San Diego, Calif., September 5, 2014 — The Optical Women's Association (OWA) has announced the appointment of Liz Segrè to its board of directors. Segrè is the founding editor and editorial director of AllAboutVision.com.

Segrè has been involved in eye care journalism for 20 years. In 1994, following a stint at Cahners Publishing, she joined Eyecare Business magazine as managing editor and later served as the magazine's editor-in-chief. In 1999, Segrè became the founding editor of AllAboutVision.com, and managed a team of freelancers and advisory board members to develop the site's initial content.

In 2011, Vision Monday named Segrè to its annual list of the Most Influential Women in Optical, citing her role "as a pioneer in providing online consumer education about eye care and eye health."

Segrè studied French Literature at the Sorbonne and obtained her degree from the University of New Hampshire, with postgraduate work at New York University.

The Optical Women's Association was founded in 1997 to enhance and promote the leadership role of women in the optical industry through networking, education and peer support.

AAV Upgrades Infrastructure to Serve Growing Audience

San Diego, Calif., August 6, 2014 - AllAboutVision.com has upgraded the speed and capacity of its web server and added a content distribution network (CDN) to ensure an optimal experience for site visitors.

The site now serves all images and scripts through a CDN with 31 locations and peering partners in North America. Prior to adding the CDN, AllAboutVision.com's server was upgraded to faster processors and higher capacity, and moved to a new datacenter for better utilization of high-performance bandwidth. AllAboutVision.com has also been serving audio files through Amazon Web Services, which continues.

Currently AllAboutVision.com serves more than 600,000 weekly unique visitors, measured by Google Analytics.

AAV Records First 500,000-Visitor Week

San Diego, Calif., June 3, 2014 - AllAboutVision.com served a record 572,231 visitors during the week leading up to Memorial Day weekend, marking the first time the site has served more than half a million unique visitors in a single week. The site benefitted from a Google algorithm change that raised rankings for numerous AllAboutVision.com articles in Google's search results, resulting in a more than 100% increase in overall unique visitors.

AllAboutVision.com's Contact Lenses section continues to be the most popular, although the site's LASIK & Vision Surgery section experienced the greatest increase as a result of the Google update. That section's home page increased in views by 271% over the past two weeks, compared with a similar period before the update, and the section's total page views were up 176%.

At current visitor traffic levels, AllAboutVision.com is expected to reach about 2.5 million unique visitors per month, tracked weekly by Google Analytics.

Articles Educate Patients about Costs, Variations of LASIK

San Diego, Calif., April 14, 2014 - AllAboutVision.com has updated its "LASIK Eye Surgery Prices" article with new information based on fees during calendar 2013.

"Some patients have unrealistic ideas about LASIK prices based on advertising they've seen or heard," says Gary Heiting, OD, AllAboutVision.com senior editor. "AllAboutVision.com's article helps ground patients with real-world information."

"LASIK Eye Surgery Prices" is the most popular article in the site's LASIK & Vision Surgery section. Over the past five years, the article has been viewed almost 2.5 million times. The update provides consumers with the latest statistics on the overall average cost of LASIK in the U.S.; average costs for bladed and wavefront, bladeless LASIK; and cost ranges charged by surgeons for various procedures.

2013 Another Year of Record Website Traffic

San Diego, Calif., January 16, 2014 - AllAboutVision.com served a record 19,665,137 million unique visitors in 2013 - a 15% increase over 2012 - as measured weekly by Google Analytics.

Website visitors viewed a total of more than 30 million pages during the year. Average time on page also increased in 2013, to 2:40 (two minutes, forty seconds) from 2:20 the previous year.

While 90% of traffic is driven by search engines, the site also benefitted from links and citations from popular consumer media such as The Washington Post, ABC World News, MSN Money, The Huffington Post and Family Circle.

Social Media, Interactivity Driving Traffic Increases and Engagement

San Diego, Calif., August 16, 2013 - A presence on social media sites, and interactive features such as polls, quizzes and video, have been boosting All About Vision's visitor traffic and strengthening site engagement.

From January through July of this year, referrals from Facebook to All About Vision increased 66% over the same period two years ago. Many of the site's most popular articles have been "Liked" and shared thousands of times, and the site's free Eye Health News Feed for Facebook is used by hundreds of eye care practices. Recently Facebook referred more than 6,000 visitors to the site in a single day.

During this period, the site's average time on page has increased 15%, and four of the five most popular articles have reading times greater than four minutes.

In addition:

Over the past two years, more than 125,000 people have voted in All About Vision polls.
Visitors watched 847,000 videos during the past 24 months.
Almost one million people have completed the "Am I a Candidate for LASIK?" interactive screening since its inception.

Through the end of July, unique visitors were up 24% over the same period last year, and up 78% over two years ago. The site is expected to serve more than 20 million unique visitors this year.

AAV to Support World Sight Day Challenge With Practice Incentive

August 8th, 2013 — All About Vision will donate $25 to Optometry Giving Sight for each practice in its Eye Care Practitioner Directory that takes part in the World Sight Day Challenge during September and October.

The World Sight Day Challenge (WSDC) is Optometry Giving Sight's largest annual global fundraising campaign. The organization is dedicated to eliminating avoidable blindness caused by uncorrected refractive error - that is, the simple need for an eye exam and glasses. The WSDC campaign is anchored by World Sight Day, an annual day of awareness to focus global attention on blindness, visual impairment and rehabilitation of the visually impaired.

Eye care practices, and all members of the ophthalmic community, can participate in the World Sight Day Challenge through workplace fundraising events and company donations. More information can be found at www.givingsight.org.

All About Vision is a national sponsor of Optometry Giving Sight at the "Supporter" level.

100 Million Visitors Served

March 1st, 2013 — Yesterday All About Vision served its 100 millionth unique visitor since the launch of the website on January 2, 2000. Unique site visitors are measured weekly by Google Analytics.

Currently All About Vision serves more visitors in two weeks than in its entire first year online, and the site is widely acknowledged as the leading online consumer resource about eye health and vision correction.

17 Million Visitors Served in 2012

January 4th, 2013 — All About Vision served a record 17 million unique visitors in 2012 - a 30% increase over 2011 - as measured weekly by Google Analytics. Visitors viewed a total of more than 28 million pages during the year.

In addition to the record visitor traffic, the following are some highlights of 2012:

AAV experienced its most-visited day ever on Wednesday, December 5, with 76,752 visits.
All About Vision - The Magazine debuted in May, produced in partnership with First Vision Media Group, and sponsored by The Vision Council.
Also in May, AAV's mobile site launched. As of December, 31% of visitors use the mobile site.
AAV increased its social media presence, including new Google+ and Pinterest pages, resulting in more than 150,000 visitors via social media platforms.
The site's Facebook page - targeted primarily to eye care professionals for keeping abreast of patient-directed news and new articles - surpassed 10,000 "Likes."
600+ eye care practices now use the site's Eye Health News Feed for Facebook.
More than 6,000 practices are now in the site's Eye Care Practitioner Directory.
4,000+ practice websites now use syndicated articles from All About Vision.
1,083,000 links on the web lead to All About Vision, according to Google.

October Promotion Raises $3,755 for Optometry Giving Sight

November 13th, 2012 — Last month, each new Facebook "Like" of All About Vision generated a $5 donation to Optometry Giving Sight.

All About Vision also contributed $5 for every new installation of its free Eye Health News Feed for Facebook, and each time a Google+ user added All About Vision to their "Circles."

In total, $3,755 was raised for the World Sight Day Challenge, a month-long campaign sponsored by Optometry Giving Sight and anchored by World Sight Day. The annual day of awareness, backed by the World Health Organization, focuses global attention on blindness and visual impairment.

Optometry Giving Sight is a global fundraising initiative that specifically targets the prevention of blindness and impaired vision due to uncorrected refractive error. All About Vision is a U.S. Gold National Sponsor of the organization.