In my Comms 101 class last night, our professor, Robert Walz, introduced me to a website that I find fascinating. It's called Statsaholic.com, and it allows you to enter domain names and compare the web traffic between sites. For instance, you could discover whether Google or Yahoo! gets visited more from month to month (It's pretty close).
So, with respect to our class, I first started by comparing different newspapers' websites:
USA Today beats the NY Times in unique visitors per month regularly, but the Times is narrowing the margin, especially in November. Both got about 15 million unique visits (UV) each during November.
In a more local context, The Salt Lake Tribune surpassed the Deseret Morning News this past summer, and hasn't fallen back behind yet. They each get around a 1/2 million UV per month.
Moving to TV news, CNN.com takes FoxNews.com and msnbc.com behind the proverbial woodshed. Not even close.
Since we have talked in class about the future of journalism and its online nature, I thought it important to compare the TV news sites to newspapers sites and news on sites like Yahoo! and Google.
Not even close.
In this comparison between the #1 site in three categories of journalism (Online= news.yahoo.com, TV= cnn.com, Newspaper= usatoday.com), Yahoo! News and CNN are doubling up USA Today in regards to unique visitors. You'll also notice that CNN once had a sizable lead on Yahoo!, but Yahoo! has closed the gap, even taking a small lead in the late summer.
Speaking locally, the top TV site in SLC, ksl.com, also doubles up on sltrib.com.
So, what does this mean with regards to our class?
That if the internet really is the future of newspapers, then they really need to beef up their online content. What do newspapers need to do with their web sites to close the gap?
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