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.

Newspaper Circulation Continues To Fall

No surprise here, but it was reported today that newspaper circulations continue to decline and in the latest report they were shown to have accelerated their pace of eyeball loss even faster. The overall drop was 10.6 percent in the April to September period, even when the economy comes back full force these numbers will not be made up. Print is done.

As a geo domain owner and developer this is something I work with customers on and help them understand the marketing implications to them. Although in many cases there may still be a need to use the newspaper for a piece of their marketing, if small businesses does not start to make the move to a combined marketing strategy taking advantage of what they know and what they do not know (online advertising) then they will be left behind and talking about how the Internet is responsible for causing their failure when in reality it was their failure to change the way they market their business to match the times.

A bit of interesting news in the report was that the Wall Street Journal actually grew slightly and has surpassed USA Today as the widest circulated print newspaper in the USA.

For a list of the top 25 newspapers and the rate of their circulation drop check out Top 25 Daily Newspapers.

Hyperlocal Online Media Acquisitions Heat Up

With the hyperlocal/community based approach to news that we have built on Missouri.me we have already started to witness the community involvment we had hoped for start to happen in various towns across the state. In those towns that either community leaders or community networkers have started to post we get additional content plus the goodwill that comes with the citizens no longer having to fight the battle to get their story out.

As many people have seen this push for hyperlocal news has caused a bit of a stir in the legacy media world as well as sites that focus on online media as they fight to determine the proper business model to approach this type of news model. As much as we love our citizen journalists on Missouri.me we also know that it does take time get these people involved on a community by community basis and as such we have not focused purely on them as our news source. And I think overall the model in the industry will be a mix of local people reporting what they consider news alongside legacy media writers doing true research journalism for indepth stories.

All that said, there have been some great stories come out this past week and month about this, here are a few stories you in the Geo domain space, or online media space in general may find interesting or useful.

I normally try not to do posts filled with links to tons of other stories but these were interesting so decided to loosen up for the day.

Hyperlocal News a $100 billion dollar market - FastCompany.com This is a great read, if you have any interest in localized/geo domains read this.

Everyblock.com Acquired by MSNBC.com - TechCrunch.com

Jeff Jarvis Creates Spreadsheet to Save Local News - TechCrunch.com

Local Yokels - Hyperlocal News Sites

AOL Buys Two Hyperlocal News Sites - AllthingsD.com

And one story about print media continuing to fall on its face (to put it bluntly): Readers Digest Goes Bankrupt