Getting spiked


I find it interesting how news Web sites differ. Maybe I’m over easily enthralled by charts. Who knows.


The daily traffic of most news sites depends on the day of the week and whether there is a big story.


A big news story results in a traffic spike. Makes sense?


What I find really interesting is how big the spikes can be for TV news sites.


(A story getting spiked online is a good thing while in the jargon of the newsroom, getting a story spiked was never a good thing — for the reporter.)



I was looking over the weekend at Alexa’s traffic statistics for knoxnews.com, WBIR and WATE.


According to Alexa, the three month average reach for each site per million Internet users is: 78.5, 62, 27.5. OK, none of us are exactly ruling the total Internet, but we reach a lot of people in our corner of it.


And granted Alexa only measures traffic through its toolbar (which I don’t use) so this is not take-it-to-the-bank data, but interesting nonetheless.


I used
alexaholic.com
to make the comparisons. It’s built on the Alexa traffic tool, but it makes it easier to make comparsions. See chart below.


What’s interesting to me is while we are all covering much the same news, the two TV sites can see huge spikes in traffic. WATE, the one with the smallest reach of three, according to Alexa, had on a single day a larger reach than knoxnews and WBIR combined. In early May, WBIR had a big spike.


The obvious answer is TV as a medium is better at driving users to its Web sites in a breaking story. Are there other answers? What does an Alxoaholic comparison (I just love writiing that) look like in your market?


alexa website statistics by alexaholic