WKRN GM: Blogs account for 40 percent of traffic
Cory Bergman April 17th, 2007
Mike Sechrist, GM of WKRN in Nashville, revealed some interesting stats here at NAB-RTNDA on his station’s success with launching 23 blogs on their own domains. “Our traffic has grown phenomenally. 60 percent of our traffic is WKRN and 40 percent is the blogs,” he said. NashvilleisTalking — which aggregates content from 435 local blogs — averages 5,000 unique visitors a day (yesterday the number hit 9,000 due to the Virginia shooting). And what about revenue? “We’re making more money this year than we’ve ever made,” Sechrist said. “And it’s from the pre-rolls on the videos.” He said WKRN is averaging 600,000 videos played a month, and much of that success is due to video’s exposure on the blogs (although he admits a reluctance to push too many ads to the blogs themselves.) But beyond money, Sechrist says “a lot of (our users) are never going to watch us on TV, but they’ll come to us on the web when something big happens. We have a relationship now.”
8 Comments Add your own
1. unsurelok | April 17th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
Somebody explain the logic / strategy of building multiple sites / domains. I don’t see it. I see this as fractured niches, so you build 23 blog sites for your reporters 23 different domains - why what is the benefit?
Are you gonna tell me there is a SEO benefit some kinda google game for pagerank?
Why does building a microcosm of the web locally work? The audience won’t mingle? The kids wont go where mom and dad go?Really?
Why wouldn’t you have one full featured site with sections, categories, functions that are tailored to the user? Then you can mash it up let them filter the site the way they want it from their own page or their groups page.
The last thing I want to do is run around to 23 freaking sites to read local blogs. I get that they have a blog aggregator and I guess they need one but that seems crazy - aggregate my own blogs because I strung them out all over the place. Why not put them on a single site on different pages and pull the recent posts into one page, I could see alot more synergy with the content that way alot more flexibility not to mention load balancing server traffic for spikes like the VT story brings.
Hey I’m just asking
2. invitedmedia | April 17th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
i’m all for adding yet another blog to mike’s stable:
NashvilleIsDrawlin.com
3. Don Day | April 17th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
I’m a big fan of WKRN - but the station previously said that blog views out-trafficked the main site (click the WKRN tag above and see the second story, filed by Steve in November ‘06). Did blog traffic go down, or did site traffic go up? Or were the previous numbers wrong?
4. mike | April 17th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
Don:
The numbers will fluctuate week to week and month to month. If we have a couple of stories on WKRN.com that go viral then traffic goes way up. If on the other hand we have a string of bad weathr days our weather blog can easily get thousands of hits and the blogs will win out that week. This answers unsurelok’s question as well which is a good one. Why have all the blogs. If everything was under the WKRN.com banner the traffic would not approach what we are seeing with multiple sites.
5. Dave | April 18th, 2007 at 7:55 am
For all the press the WKRN site gets, it’s curious that their traffic numbers are barely a blip on Hitwise and less than stellar on Alexa. The traffic numbers don’t seem to equal the hype.
6. unsurelok | April 18th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
thats because traffic is spread across 23 diffferent site
7. unsurelok | April 18th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
skipping the mod delay…
Mike prove it, i’d like some empirical data on the many vs one.You’re saying a weather blog - by being on a different url - is somehow better at traffic conversion? I’ll better its not better at cross utilization of the total feature set of the collective sites.
I’ve worked with some of the most respected SEO companies in the biz and they would tell you at best it would be a wash, at worst you might get flagged as a link farm and get your PR lowered. From a search engines perspective.
Are you saying that most of your traffic is referred from search engines? People don’t come directly to these pages?Maybe they can’t find them without a search engine because they are sprinkled all over the web.
I still don’t see the evidence, if the weather blog was a page/section at WKRN how would perform inferior to this distinct url.
From a marketing perspective its alot easier to create a memorable brand to market and for the user to go to /remember. How is this inferior: www(dot)foxnews(dot)com/oreilly/index.html ?
It seems to me what you aren’t saying is you are trying to distance the personal opinions and entertainment and community discussions from the sacrosanct BROADCAST NEWS page which would be contrary to the mission wouldn’t it?
I appreciate the reply
8. Grimmy | April 18th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
I think whether you want to aggregate your blogs under one name, or spread them out over many uncommon ones depends on your unique market.
If you have a very strong brand and either rival or kick the newspaper’s ass, you should keep things under your strong brand.
If you have a weak brand and a weak site, you should consider doing something like this to attract new users from search optimization.
I think something that gets glossed over a lot that is true in television and should also hold true on the web is that there is no one perfect answer for every station. We’re all our own little snowflakes and no two should be alike.
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