For a newsroom accountable to a place, geography is not a detail attached to the audience. Geography is the audience. Blrb reports every click at the zip code level with Census figures attached.
Try it with your own link
Paste any web address. We check it, then reserve your blrb link.
A sample story's clicks, mapped by zip code. Pick a region to see how the reach and the readers change.
Sample clicks
Zip codes reached
Who clicked, compared with everyone in the region
| Readers | Region |
|---|
Top zip codes
Sample data: click counts are illustrative. The figures for each zip code are real U.S. Census Bureau data, the same fields your own links report.
Say an investigation does 4,000 clicks. Good day. Now answer the question that actually matters.
A housing story that lands entirely in the wealthiest zip codes reached the people least affected by it. The click total looks identical either way.
A statewide network can post a strong number while reaching two cities and none of the other sixty counties. Nothing in a click count would tell you.
Boards, underwriters, and grant officers all ask who you reach. A map is a better answer than a total, and a harder one to argue with.
Most shorteners stop at country, sometimes city. City is too coarse for a newsroom. Boston is not one audience, it is dozens.
Every click resolves to a postal code, not a metro blob. See the difference between Dorchester and Cambridge, North County and South Bay, Nassau and Suffolk.
Median household income, homeownership versus renting, median home value, and urban, suburban or rural share for the places your stories actually land.
If your housing coverage reaches homeowners at three times the rate it reaches renters, that is a finding. You cannot act on it until you can see it.
A reader deciding whether to click looks at the domain. Readable, branded links answer the provenance question before anyone has to ask it.
Paste the URL, add a custom alias if you want one. Same workflow you already have.
Newsletter, push alert, social post, printed QR code. Blrb does not care which channel.
A week later you either prove your reach matches your coverage area, or you learn where it does not.
Your list has subscribers. It does not have geography. A shortened link in the newsletter gives you both, without asking readers for anything.
Turn "our stories got 4,000 clicks" into a map of the service area. Export the raw data to CSV when someone wants to check your work.
A story that performs in one county and vanishes in the next one over usually has a distribution problem, not an audience problem. Those are fixable in an afternoon.
You are going to check these claims, so here they are up front.
Click geography comes from IP address. That is reliable at the zip and metro level and unreliable below it. Anyone selling you household precision from a click log is selling something that does not exist.
A click from a zip with a median income of $80,000 tells you about the place. It does not tell you the reader earns $80,000. Worth saying out loud before someone says it for you.
Datacenter and crawler traffic is excluded from your counts by ASN, so uptime monitors and link checkers do not inflate your numbers. Your own reporting deserves the same standard you would apply to a source.
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Competitor pricing shown as published at the time of writing. Check their site before quoting it in a budget request.
No. You can run Blrb alongside whatever you use now and point a single campaign at it to compare. Nothing has to migrate for you to find out whether the geography is useful.
No. Click locations are recorded at neighborhood scale and map coordinates are randomized by roughly 50 to 100 feet before display. There is no reader profile, no cross-site tracking, and nothing to opt out of.
Yes. Full CSV export on Pro, including timestamps, zip codes, coordinates, and the Census fields. If you want to do your own analysis in R or a spreadsheet, the data is yours.
Never, on any plan. A link carrying your newsroom's name should not render an ad you did not sell. That is an easy promise for us to make and an easy one to verify.
Reach out. Public media, nonprofit newsrooms, and student papers are the reason this page exists, and $5 a month should never be the reason a newsroom cannot measure its own reach.
Put one story link through it this week. You will either confirm your reach matches your coverage area, or you will learn exactly where it does not.
Create Your AccountWorking at a public media station or nonprofit newsroom? Email sean@blrb.ai and we will turn on Pro so you can see the zip data right away.