I’m getting some friends and co-workers of mine telling me that the http://www.brentdavidpayne.com/bleet/images/Top-News-Sites-Stats.pdf PDF I created about the different newspaper.coms and how they are doing year over year is getting passed around quite a bit out there. I can’t tell because I don’t have analytics tracking on a PDF page. I guess that is a lesson to me to put PDF files on a landing page from now on, huh?

At any rate, I wanted to point out a couple of things that I saw from the data.

1. Tribune is actually doing fairly well. We are holding our own against the likes of NYTimes.com. Sure they are pulling ahead of Tribune slightly but considering the wins they have publicized about SEO, their considerably larger circulation, and stronger brand name…you can expect that a little. Give us some time to catch up on their SEO and some time to redesign our papers to be more exciting to a wider audience…we’ll catch up.
2. Gannett, a company that seems to be a friend and foe [scratch foe, replace with perhaps competitor…but it didn’t sound as good] of Tribune’s at the same time, seems to be stalling online. I find that personally interesting considering they seem to be the most similar to Tribune. How? They have a few large brands (well, they may actually only have just one) and a lot of smaller publications. This is similar to the Tribune Network of sites.
3. A real shocker to me is Fox. Those guys are charging onward and upward. Granted they have some pretty cool stuff happening. For example their Fox.com domain (which probably isn’t included in this report…but I don’t know for sure) is well designed, albeit a bit flash-y, and offers the best user experience of the major networks for watching full length shows. I personally just finished watching Terminator Season 2 episodes 1 & 2 back to back in full HD glory and in full screen. They offer their shows within 24 hours of airing while other networks make you wait a full week or more. I’m definitely taking notice of their success online. I’ll be honest…it’s a little concerning.
4. Another shocker to me in not such a positive way is USATODAY.com. Why in the hell aren’t they doing better? They have insane circulation numbers (#1 in the country, yes they beat NYTimes.com too), they are nationally focused which is HUGE for search engine optimization, and they have great brand recognition. Why they aren’t doing as well as Tribune or NYTimes.com is baffling to me. Anyone care to enlighten me? Seriously. I am new to the media industry so I’m sure there is a worthwhile reason that I just don’t know about.
5. Obviously, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention TheHuffingtonPost.com. They are growing like a weed (and yes, I chose weed wisely). Plus, they are doing it with very little overhead. I know that Tribune papers get honorable mentions on Huff and we notice the spike in traffic when we do. They are a great partner if you want instant page views and visitors, but a few more months of growth like they experienced in August and I think they could well eat any of the big paper’s lunch. Of course, there is one catch . . . they don’t have the mounds of content without people like Tribune, Gannett, and the NYT to provide it for them. What is up with their site design though? Ugh.
6. Google News didn’t grow as swiftly as one would have expected. There may be reasons for that or perhaps they just had an off month. Frankly, I didn’t realize they were as small as this list states they are, but…they can sure drive some great traffic if you can get on the top of the Google News homepage for a nationally popular news story. Otherwise, most of the traffic you see from them comes via their integrated results in Google Web queries, which can be quite significant at times.
7. Oh yeah . . . MSNBC.com grew. Duh! Olympics. NBC. MSN. That’s a given. Talk about the dream team of companies and events. Lucky bastard to whoever is handling their SEO.

Glad to hear that people are finding the PDF helpful (even if I can’t tell how many people are finding it helpful).

P.S. This was a long Bleet . . . I probably should’ve made it a blog post. Shame on me. Abusing bleets like that. LOL