DOES size matter? It's a question that has plagued the mind of men (and women, but in a different way) for time in memoriam.

But these days, it does seem that bigger is better.

Take those trendy bank ads with Tony Hopkins and that bloke out of Lock Stock; or take the way you know they are big actors: they have big audiences, and, on the internet, audience is everything.

Newspapers have always set great store by their readership figures, but, even though they know exactly how many newspapers they sell, they can only ever guess how many people actually read the paper. Usually you multiply the sales figure by about three, as some papers are ditched after one reader has had a flick through, while others are eagerly scoured by an an entire household. And you never actually know what pages they actually read.

Now with on-line newspapers such as the online version of the Evening Telegraph, This is Lancashire, we can not only tell how many people have logged on, we can also tell exactly how many times any particular bit has been looked at.

Take last month, for example; the busiest bit of our site was the Burnley sports pages, not doubt in some small part to the Clarets' success in escaping the clutches of Division 2. During May we had 46,984 requests for pages in the Burnley sports section; Rovers fans might want to know that the Blackburn sports section had 36,159 page requests in the same month. Overall, thisislancashire recorded 458,050 page requests during the month of May, making us the biggest local portal site in Lancashire. Size matters.

www.thisislancashire.co.uk