Monday, Jul. 27, 2009

It was a record-setting Water Follies

By Ken Robertson, Herald Executive Editor

Thanks to the internet, we now can tell you precisely how much Tri-Citians love the Water Follies and the Lamb Weston Columbia Cup hydroplane races.

As of early Monday evening, they love it about 240,000 page views, on Monday alone. They also loved it 150,000 page views on what otherwise would have been a hot, sleepy, summer Sunday.

And 108,000 on Saturday and 118,000 on Friday.

Monday’s traffic was, as our web guru Andy Perdue reported, “heavily local.”

Barring a surprise, our software that monitors our web traffic indicates by midnight we’ll surpass 300,000 page views, which would be a record by a lot.

Our previous one-day high was fueled by artificial traffic generated by the citation on the Drudge report of a wire story from Olympia. That helped generate a day of 236,000 page views.

Of course, a website needs content to attract that much interest, either that or something shocking, bizarre or naked. Better yet, maybe all three.

But we did it with old-fashioned content.

Our photo and online staffs posted just under 1,700 photos from the races.

Plus, there were 80 blog items, 43 stories, 19 videos — including six from our KEPR TV media partner — and 11 hydro team profiles.

Oh yeah, and the web guys down in Columbia Park also sold 150 newspapers.

Not to mention the 40,000-plus papers we delivered and sold elsewhere each day over the weekend.

There’s a reason newspapers and their websites draw lots of web traffic.

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

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