CINCINNATI (TDB) -- The green line on the chart is for DailyKos. Cleveland.com (Plain Dealer) is blue; Cincinnati.com (Cincinnati Enquirer) is orange; Ohio.com (Akron Beacon Journal) is red. The data is from Google Trends, which analyzes and estimates Web searches by topic. The programming is still being perfected, but Google says the data can be "interesting and entertaining" if not quite completely nailed down. Here's what Google says:"Google Trends is a Google Labs product, which means it's still in its early stages of development. The data Trends produces may contain inaccuracies for a number of reasons, including data-sampling issues and a variety of approximations that are used to compute results. We hope you find this service interesting and entertaining, but you probably wouldn't want to write your Ph.D. dissertation based on the information provided by Trends."
There is more about Google Trends here. The Cleveland.com Website had a significant uptick in February and March -- according to this data -- when the Ohio presidential primary loomed large on the national political calendar. From then 'til now, the trendlines for all the Ohio sites have been descending slowly, which doesn't bode well for the newspapers' efforts to morph from print to online. Of course, Google's data could be off. But it seems as if you are a one or two person blog getting 500 to 1,000 visits a day, you are doing pretty well compared to the big newpaper portals. In mid-June, the data shows the Cincinnati.com site was getting around 25,000 daily unique visitors. And that's with a large staff, access to the wire services, along with advertising and branding campaigns, a corporate marketing effort, a sales force and promotions online.
I'm not sure why this is supposed to be news. Daily Kos is one of the top five most-read blogs on the Internet and has a worldwide audience. How is this supposed to compare to a regional newspaper?
ReplyDeleteDaily Kos traffic is going up. Ohio newspaper traffic is going down. "How is this supposed to compare to a regional newspaper?" The news is that Daily Kos is growing!!!! The people who run newspaper companies can't figure out how to grow their business. They are being left behind. Just what I expected. Can't say I'm joyful. Thanks for posting this information, Bill.
ReplyDeleteDaily Kos is simple, easily accessible, updated frequently. It's user friendly. The newspapers online are full of traps. They are created with deadends to make visitors click, click, click away. By intent, the designs are hard to navigate. They want to trick and hold people. However, the online community is wise to such deceits. So they don't visit the hard to use newspaper sites in great numbers. Those media sites weren't created for ease of access. They were built for grabbing people to hold them for corporate revenue.
ReplyDeleteDoes anybody know if more people read the New York Times online or in print? How does that compare to the regional newspapers?
ReplyDeleteDo more people read the Plain Dealer, or the Portland Oregonian, online than on paper? What is that trend?