I was reading the TVSpy.com forums recently and someone mentioned that NBC’s Locals Only sites were a flop and lost traffic after the switch from regular TV station branded sites.
So I decided to do some digging and compare how the Miami station web sites rank against each other, mostly for my own amusement.
This comparison is based on public data from Quantcast. Both NBCMiami.com and JustNews.com track their web traffic using a pixel on their sites and the analytics are publically available. However, from personal experience the numbers are probably a little lower than what the stations see with their private web analytics tools.
Right off the bat … JustNews.com wins quite handily. In total traffic terms, WPLG’s site has about 1.7 million readers monthly vs 417,326 for WTVJ.
Looking at the chart the first thing I notice is the trend NBCMiami.com seems to be in at this time. They have a huge drop off in unique visitors at the end of April 2009, while beating WPLG’s web site. But by mid May NBCMiami has another even bigger drop in visitors going from what looks like a high of 700-800,000 to something in the range of 250-300,000 at the lowest. And by mid June JustNews.com continues to make huge gains.
Now to be fair here, JustNews.com also gets front-page links on CNN.com because of the deal between InternetBroadcasting and CNN.
Some of the stats below: only for US traffic. I’ve committed global traffic out.
Station site: NBCMiami.com JustNews.com
Quantcast Rank 3,893 786
Visitors (uniq) 417,329 1.7 Million
Page Views/month 1.592 mil 4.467 million
Avg Page Views per visit 2.37 1.53
Avg Page Views per person 3.82 2.57
Page views per visit shows how many pages the average visitor reads. The higher the average the better because every time a visitor loads a new page with it loads a new ad. Thus the website makes more money on display advertising which is charged at $X per 1000 page views. In this case NBCMiami has the advantage, their visitors read more pages on each visit, either because people are lost looking for something, find a lot of things they like or because JustNews is easy too navigate, who knows.
Trend-wise, according to Quantcast NBCMiami’s daily traffic compared with May 2009 trending down over 60%, but up triple digits for weekly (+241%) and monthly (+120%) people and page views. JustNews.com compared to May 2009 is trending upwards, +53% for daily, -76% for weekly, and +266% for monthly people and page views.
Station site: NBCMiami.com JustNews.com
Passers by 79% make up 48% of visits 77% – make up 45% visits
Regulars 21% make up 45% of visits 23% – make up 48% of visits
Addicts elow 1% – 5% of visits below 1% – 7% of visits
Turns out not much of a repeating traffic on either NBCMiami.com or JustNews.com. For comparison SFLTV’s traffic is over 60-70% regular visitors with about the same number who type us directly into the URL filed i.e. people who really really really like us and want to visit 🙂
One interesting thing I noticed is that our “Average page views per visit” are identical to those of JustNews.com. I guess that makes us page views per visit twins?!
In about 4 months I’ll revisit the charts and see if anything changes, but it looks like NBCMiami has a lot of catching up to do, though considering they’re “locals only” and South Florida isn’t that big they’re probably not doing too bad considering the limited market.
This doesn’t surprise me. The old NBC6.net website was fairly easy to navigate. I find the revamp makes it much harder to find local news. Lots of multimedia and celebrity gossip are prominent now. Seems to have no synergy with the on-air broadcast material anymore.
NBC6.net was very confusing to navigate. It is true that NBCMiami.com has less emphasis on Local News, but I think that part of the reason Locals ONly failed is because people dont really associate those websites with their local NBC station, they rather associate it with the NBC network at a local standpoint.
What about CBS4.com? And WSVN.com, which I think seriously needs to be redone.
JustNews.com has the world’s largest cheerleader pushing their site. CNN!
JustNews.com’s numbers are tainted by the fact that CNN constantly links to them. I wondered why ? Then I realized that CNN owns part of Internet Broadcast which runs JustNews.com and several other sites.
If you look at CNN’s site they link mostly to Internet Broadcast sites and then sprinkle in other CNN affiliates. All about the almighty dollar.
Well I can do a comparison with CBS4 and WSVN but services like Quantcast and Alexa only offer best guess based on click stream data and in alexa’s case click stream and toolbar so they’re not very accurate. Probably more about trends than anything else. I know they severely under report what our traffic here is
People visit local site for local news. NBC is lost in a tailspin and ruining local news. The new NBC websites are useless so why visit after one visit. There’s no local recap of stories you might have missed or wanted more information.
Hitwise, a subscribed paid data service, has ranked CBS4.com #1 in market share amongst local TV station websites for the past consecutive 10 months. When you change the name of your website and split off your weather as it’s own site, you’re bound to lose traffic.
Totally campy and tabloidish. Over opinionated website run by people who do not know south Florida. NBCMiami.com is the worst…bar none.
I liked this passage: “the numbers are probably a little lower than what the stations see with their private web analytics tools.” Of COURSE the stations see ‘higher’ numbers; all the better to bludgeon advertisers with! The whole game is to show ‘higher’ numbers of viewers or clicks because that’s why you exist! Never mind that your ‘higher’ numbers are plain WRONG. Shhhh…not supposed to talk about THAT. TV news: Nothing more than glue holding commercials together.
I think you’re taking what I said out of context and lack complete understanding of what actually web analytics does.
The number are a little different because the tracking with third party tools, such as Quantcast, is done via a pixel embedded within the code of the webpage. And which doesn’t always load, is blocked etc etc
Thus it tends to under report visitors
The stations (and we do it too as does most every other site out there by default pretty much) run an analytics program on their own servers which log every hit to the server and have the tendency not to miss hits since tracking is done without the need for anything in the web page code.
Also, advertisers pretty much insist on using 3rd party tracking, internal data isn’t used for selling ads.