WLEX capitalizes on web weather coverage

Cory Bergman March 18th, 2008

Lexington’s WLEX drove 455,000 pageviews in a single day — in a market with around 1 million people — due to it’s aggressive coverage of a big snowstorm. “We’re coming to the point where the online is as important as on air,” said Bruce Carter, director of news and marketing.

3 Comments Add your own

1. Don Day | March 18th, 2008 at 9:42 am

We’ve been working to position ourselves as the weather website — and during a snow storm last month, we saw traffic over the 500k mark for 4 days in a row - and a spike up to 900k. It powered KTVB.COM to a record month, and we’ve stayed at a higher level than before the storm. Weather is the best, easiest driver of traffic — but you have to do the work in advance so people know where to turn.
2. Don Day | March 18th, 2008 at 9:42 am

I should say “the weather website in our market”
3. SMB | March 18th, 2008 at 10:42 am

I love weather as well - but weather page views are like crack, they’re easy to score and get hooked on.

10k uniques on a big weather day can equal 250k page views, easy - thanks to refreshing content, etc - and 25 page views per unique certainly is high engagement - so it looks good.

Just remember to keep the focus on building unique users, not page views, since anyone can “manufacture” page views with meta tags, etc - but you can’t (easily) manufacture a unique visitor, right?

Like I said - weather is the crack of the TV web business. Digg and Fark are more like meth…but that’s another story….