Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Study: Raleigh TV station had 3 times more internet hits in April than the News & Observer web site

A report published today by Internet Broadcasting says WRAL, a TV station in Raleigh, had more than 3 times the number of web site hits in April than the News & Observer newspaper site.

And the trend is working against newspaper sites. The report also found that average television station web site usage grew in April and that station web sites are continuing to gain share.

WRAL reaches 27 percent of the Raleigh market, according to the report.

Click here to see the full study.


Hat tip: Fitz and Jen
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Of course the trend is working against newspaper sites. They're spent the last 50 years without competition and have no idea what it means to cater to broad appeal.

What would you expect them to do? Try and compete by following a fiercely objective business model, or cater to their ideological brothers in hopes for a government parachute?

TV stations are all too aware that they are but a flick of the channel away from dog doo doo. Newspapers however are stuck in the 60's under control of the worst generation.

Anonymous said...

Nobody goes to the N&O to get their news any more. Whether it be paper or net.

Arul Sudnaram said...

Kevin - thanks for citing our work. We appreciate it. I wanted to clarify our aims: we were really looking at local (in-market) usage, not total Interent usage. As you and most of the readers of this blog know, in-market usage is the key metric that drives ad revenue for most local media companies. It's akin to the local circulation number for newspapers or the broadcast ratings for local tv stations. Online, however, that number is rarely published. Instead, people focus on total usage, which includes many out of market visitors. We wanted to see how the traditional business models of these companies were translating online. Therefore, we felt the local usage number was a more accurate number and that it needed to be highlighted.

Anonymous said...

Sure there's some news, but it's the weather pages. They also auto-reload if you leave the page up and walk away to create phantom impressions. Might be easier site to browse but in the end it's a very shallow site with good weather component. How much money do they make from advertising on that site compared to what the N&O site makes? I'd bet the N&O beats the crap out of them on the bottom line. Any idea about that?