Few Website Visitors To Rural Newspaper Websites

Tonight I decided to do some competitive analysis comparing traffic to certain towns and areas in Missouri to the competing newspaper website in the area.

I had done this for a few towns before but this time I did so on a larger scale, I cannot say I looked at every newspaper site but enough where I could spot trends in data enough where I felt comfortable making certain assumptions.

Well, a couple things were made real clear:

• Sites that had RSS feeds and were open to syndication had more traffic than those that did not, this makes sense to me but knowing how the media industry feels about that it does not surprise me that many do not offer RSS feeds.
• In the cases that it was evident they were doing other things to promote the site (i.e .promoting it in their own paper...) there was more traffic.

Without a doubt as rural broadband stimulus pushed broadband deeper into the rural areas these newspaper companies are going to falter fast, right now the rural papers are the only ones holding steady but from talking to small businesses the desperation is even starting to be felt in the small areas.

To give you an idea of how low the traffic stats are, a really large portion of the sites had Alexa rankings of 20 million to 10 million, the next larger amount was between 7 to 5 million. VERY few had Alexa rankings below 1 million. The ones that did were major cities.

To be honest I am not a fan of Alexa rankings since I have enough sites to see how the data can be skewed, but in a case like this where the user base is pretty non-tech savvy the rankings cannot be gamed, makes for a cleaner set of data, but still not perfect, but fine for this test.

Now, what may not be clear is that many of these newspapers cover more than one county, so it is not like the customer base is only 5 thousand people.

One thing I did find is the sites that have taken the time to form community/social interactions on the site are fairing much better.

If these sites cannot figure out how to bring more than a few visitors to their site a day they will not be able to keep advertisers, it is obvious they are fighting the battle to keep the status quo and if they do not figure something out quick they may be gone faster than we expected.

It may sound like I look forward to that, I do not, as much as I am building a business to take advantage of the shift it is actually a bit sad to see an industry fall apart because they refused to innovate and I do think their will be some quality journalism that suffers because of this.

One interesting note is I found one local newspaper in a town of less than 9000 that had an Alexa below 300K but then one in a town of over 30K that had an Alexa around 7 million. Seems if you have a plan and the community gets behind it you can get traction. Small town or not people are online and broadband is coming fast.

Yellow Page Decline Continues While Facebook Search Grows

During this past week a couple different things happened both worthy of their own blog post but time never really allowed me to get them done so I am getting them out together.

We all know that the Yellow Pages (and all copy cats) have had a continued decline in the usage of their print version, no secrets there. If early indications from real life examples are a sign of an accelerating move of their customers to smaller, less expensive ads then this year it could be a real scary ride for the industry.

A couple examples:

• While meeting with a large regional bank this week the marketing director indicated they cut their budget to a very small percentage for this year as compared to previous years based on the trends of people moving online. The person indicated that they previously had full page ads in their section of the Yellow Pages but had decided to move to the smallest listing available with a logo. How is that for a significant shift. When a conservative regional bank is making moves like that and starting to put more of their money into online marketing you know it is going to be a tough year.
• A fast growing local restaurant actually moved completely away from any paid listing in the Yellow Pages and moved back to the completely free listing. They thought it made more sense to focus their effort on expanding their web presence.

What I find particularly interesting is that the bank, who sets a yearly marketing budget and starts implementing it as soon as 2010 starts, has made such a strong move away from such a long running tradition as full page ads in their regional Yellow Page edition. This tells  me that last year was horrible for the Yellow Pages but now even the most rural and conservative of businesses are pulling out, in other words, even the strongholds in the rural regions are starting to move away.

Now on to Facebook, over the past month and a half I have seen a STRONG, and I should emphasize STRONG move upward in the amount of traffic I am receiving from Facebook search. I had read quite a bit about Facebook and the work they were putting into their search functions and had paid quite a bit of attention to that and had actually tested some things around that to see how it affected traffic to various sites.

Well the verdict is in and the Facebook dream scenario is happening more and more, Facebook would love for people not to go to Google to search (which is one of Googles biggest fears obviously), and with the amount of traffic I am seeing from Facebook search for quite a few different keyword terms it tells me that people are starting to be even more sticky to Facebook. Hopefully I can test a few scenarios with this soon and report back with some real numbers, but I can say that for certain terms that I rank well for in Google that I am getting just as much traffic from Facebook from them. A little side note, Facebook web search is powered by Bing....

Do You Still Read Print Magazines and Newspapers?

Sunday afternoon I was spending a lazy day around the house (we all deserve one) when I realized I was holding the devil in my hands, I was actually reading a print media magazine. One of those old school things that we had before this Internet thingy.

Obviously there is a major shift happening in the news and print media world that everybody could see coming except for the people actually in the middle of it. That shift is the accelerating move of people reading news, opinions, and everything else online. As much as we that live in the online world would like to believe that everyone reads online the major move did not happen until the last couple years and it is accelerating every quarter, and this is not just due to the economy. The shift is here to stay.

Well, in reality I have only ever subscribed to the print newspaper for maybe a total of 6 months, this was around 1995 or so. Pretty much directly after that my news world started to come from media sites online. But I always continued to subscribe to several (ok probably 10) print magazines because for some reason I found them more useful than print newspapers. News is real time, much of the articles in magazines were more story and research based so real time did not matter as much.

Over the years though I have continued to shift until I got to the point where I subscribe to only 2 print publications, those are Wired and Fast Company.

Those 2 magazines are my 2 favorites and I think they still have very good, interesting, and forward thinking articles. I really wish Business 2.0 was still around since that was #2 only to Wired for me.

Anyway, I am sure over the next year or two I will likely quit subscribing to those as well and move completely online.

As the majority of my readers are from a pretty tech savvy online crowd, do you still subscribe to any print magazines or newspapers? How much longer and if you care to share what are they and why?

NOTE: After I wrote this Cate sent me a link to a great story that has about every link you would ever need to understand the shift and what it means. Thanks Cate!!!! I have reading material (online) for awhile.