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Wednesday, November 3, 2010

News Station sites show promise as election interest peaks

Public radio news stations continued their steady uptick in traffic with site visits surging as the mid-term elections approached in early November. A 10-station, day-after-the-polls review news sites found several clear trends:

Many of the leading online news stations, such as Vermont Public Radio (see chart) saw their daily visits double.
Stations like VPR that made major adjustments in their online news approach—creating news-centric homepages, increasing online editorial staff and on-air promotion—saw even steeper gains in pageviews of election-related content. VPR, for example, saw news-pageviews jump by 20 times their monthly trend lines.

These increases should be viewed in perspective: they are large percentage increases following long periods of under-performance. Regardless, the traffic figures illustrate the potential for expanded online service at a time when the Internet has become the second most important source of election news, behind TV but ahead of radio and newspapers.