Weather Or Not: How to increase your web traffic
A report this morning from Nielsen//NetRatings shows that 15.4 million unique visitors came to TV station sites hosted by Internet Broadcasting last month, setting a new record for the company. This is a 12% increase from January, which held the previous high.
Internet Broadcasting is the largest publisher of local news for broadcast affiliates and serves such sites as NBC10.com in Philadelphia, NBC4.com in D.C. and Telemundo47.com in New York. This company provides both a content management system and content to populate local TV web sites. I know that in many cases, sites are populated by an IB employee and not a journalist hired by the local affiliate.
What's behind the spike? IB says the weather. Users are visiting these TV sites for meterologist blogs, where they can get immediate, interactive information from their local weatherpeople and comment directly back to them. As part of the weather blog microsites, many of IB's stations also solicit and publish user-generated photos and videos during storms.
This absolutely dumbfounds me. I lived in Philadelphia for three years and was always surprised at the amount of local air time devoted to storm coverage. I'm from Chicago. We're no strangers to snow storms, tornados and record heat -- sometimes all in the same week. And yet in Philly, I remember watching a nightly newscast devoted almost entierly to Glenn "Hurricane" Schwartz's announcement of the impending weather apocalypse.
On the NBC10.com site, the weather plays a very prominent role: forecase, news, media, features, blogs, and plenty of user generated content.
Now here's the kicker. I think that a lot of publishers and editors think they know what users want: lengthy, heady stories about political corruption, videos of community events. More white space. Less clutter.
The top-ranked websites in terms of traffic continue to be search engines/ aggregators and social networking sites. Of the top 25, only four differ: Microsoft (#15), CNN.com (#16), Mapquest (#24) and...wait for it...Weather.com (#23).
Maybe all we really want is a good search platform and the ability to know what it's like outside while we sit in our windowless offices.
More on this issue:
WeatherBug from Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion
Weather-o-Rama from the American Press Institute
Seed Newsvine