Friday, Aug. 01, 2008

The naked truth about web readership

By Ken Robertson, Herald Executive Editor

There was some good news about newspapers this week that largely was ignored by both print and electronic media.

Newspaper websites now reach 40.2 percent of all the web users nationwide, according to data from the Newspaper Association of America that was compiled by Nielsen Online, which measures web audience for The Nielsen Co.

In addition, newspaper websites gained 12 percent more visitors from April 1 to June 30, according to the NAA report.

At the Herald, we’ve seen an even more dramatic surge. Since the beginning of 2008, we’ve recorded consistent gains in total page views and in unique visitors to our tricityherald.com website. Total number of page views (the number of times a story, photo, blog or other content is looked at) has risen by more than 40 percent since Jan. 1.

Our online market share among Tri-City news and information organizations also has grown rapidly, and now is several times greater than any of the area TV or radio station websites. In fact, our web audience is more than twice as large as all the area network TV stations combined.

“The latest audience figures provide further evidence that newspapers’ digital properties deliver highly accurate and hyper-local content that consumers can’t find elsewhere,” said NAA CEO John Sturm.

The Herald, like many newspapers, has added new blogs, an array of photo galleries that included about 1,500 photos in July, 30 to 40 videos and hundreds of daily news updates each month.

Website visitors have responded quickly. In July, the Herald’s nearly 298,000 online readers — called unique visitors in online lingo — looked at our stories, photos, videos, blogs and other content more than 2.2 million times (page views).

We also recently added the opportunity for readers to comment on our website. You can go online and read our news and opinions, then tell everyone what you think about it. Since we offered the commenting feature in late May, readers have done that more than 1,700 times.

The Herald website has turned into an instantaneous barometer of what folks want to read about from the broad variety of news and information we offer. Tracking information allows us to compile real-time data about what people are reading and viewing every moment of the day.

Crime stories play big. Four of the top 10 most-read stories for July were about the tragic murder of a Pasco woman whose baby was cut from her womb.

But also in the top 10 was a story that I suspect our Hanford scientists and medical community read avidly, which told about using an MRI scanner at Kadlec Medical Center to look at ancient Roman scrolls. Stories on the boat that burned up during Water Follies and on the Miss Tri-Cities contestant who declined to take part in the swimwear part of the competition also were well-read.

For example, one about the burning boat was posted on the breaking news part of the site last Sunday, it drove traffic there from 30 to 40 page views an hour to more than 200 page views an hour for the next seven hours.

And one of our newsroom jokes is that readers can’t resist a story about a man being Tasered by the police, especially if he’s also naked.

Unbelievable as it sounds, Tasering happened not once but three times in July. And naked arrests happened not once, but twice in our fair cities.

As for naked and Tasered? Just once.

Our online world is indeed just as wild and crazy as our daily newspaper — maybe even more so.

We hope you’re enjoying the ride.

Ken Robertson: 582-1520; krobertson@tricityherald.com