The CNN.com windfall
Don Day July 30th, 2008
It’s becoming a dirty little secret in the cubicles occupied by web producers and managers all over the country. Get a story on CNN.com and see your traffic explode.
The mega-news site is now linking to stories done by affiliates of its CNN Newsource service. CNN doesn’t ask for anything in return, but in my experience they will ask for a few minor story adjustments (neutral time references and a dateline, mostly). A CNN.com story brings a big traffic windfall, and sometimes leads to a series of secondary referrals from other sites that notice the story. The same phenomena happens with Digg or Drudge or Fark - but getting a story on CNN.com is considerably easier. Really it just has to be “good” and somewhat unique and you’re there.
A bunch of links can wreak havoc on your metrics. Pageviews and uniques go way up, but average time spent and PVs/user counts can plunge. Overall the stats can be impressive, but how well does this serve your advertiser base if their ads we’re seen far from your local market? Thoughts?
33 Comments Add your own
1. Anonymous | July 30th, 2008 at 10:03 am
What’s a neutral time reference?
You can serve different ads to people with non-local IP addresses and keep those metrics separate. That creates a virtual second site and an actual second revenue source.
2. tdc | July 30th, 2008 at 10:10 am
it’s quite clear (and even more pathetic) how some real weak headlines are featured to push up numbers towards the end of every month to ‘affiliates’ whose numbers are otherwise lagging.
cnn shame on you for letting this happen.
and on a different note- out-of-market eyeballs (and monetizing them) are still a topic of debate here? can’t we move on to other things, like all these sub-$5 media stocks???
3. Gorman | July 30th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Seeing the big sexy numbers for PV’s and UV’s is nice, but unless you’re selling to national accounts, I personally feel they can cause more harm than good in some cases.
As you mentioned, some of the detail metrics like time on site and pages per visit will tank, and unless you get on these sites consistently the year-to-year numbers could look horrible.
Also, it’s not unimaginable that internet-unsavvy clients in smaller markets could borrow trouble and wonder why they haven’t gotten a bump in business comparable to the increase in traffic.
4. Don Day | July 30th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Sorry… “neutral time reference” is just kinda my word for it. Instead of “today” or “yesterday” you would say “Wednesday” or “Tuesday”
5. wtf web producers? | July 30th, 2008 at 11:26 am
what’s the point of this windfall?
a. the traffic is not local, so it just wastes impression of your local advertisers.
b. it reaches a ‘global’ audience who aren’t going to come back to you.
c. it taxes / stresses / takes down or at the very least runs up your hosting bill for no benefits (see points a & b) … so it only costs your company money.
I guess for 24-36 hours you can brag to the rest of the newsroom on what a good job you did!
…so there’s that.
6. Safran | July 30th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Look at it this way…
Suppose you were a local advertiser in a newspaper. One day, for some reason, an out-of-market company decides to buy 100,000 copies of the paper and have it shipped there.
The next month, the paper gets to brag its circulation went up, so it charges a little more for advertising.
Meanwhile, you get nothing.
7. Tony Courtwright | July 30th, 2008 at 11:45 am
I tend to agree with #5, but local media and their advertisers may see some SEO benefit from additional global links and traffic.
8. tdc | July 30th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
or, you could look at it this way…
if those 100,000 papers knew where they were headed (like 90% of ip addresses indicate), then the advertising would be customized to that location.
the content then disconnects from the advertising.
porn sites seem to do a bang up job in knowing what city you are in.
as in most cases, it’s an industry that tends to lead.
9. Ed | July 30th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Tony’s hit on a huge point. Getting links from a site with a pagerank like CNN is going to have material effect on your own site’s pagerank.
But, again, that’s the much dreaded “national traffic”, so if you’re STILL not monetizing national traffic, this is STILL not a benefit.
Then, there’s inbound links from Blogs, Digg, Drudge, Fark - all national traffic.
Starting to see how having a national sales initiative might actually be a positive thing?
It’s the Web. It’s not TV.
You’re not constrained by a DMA any more, embrace it.
10. Brink | July 30th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Yeah, God forbid more people look at our sites! We don’t want that.
11. Brink | July 30th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Yeah, what’s wrong with you people? We don’t want large number of people to be exposed to our websites!
After all, they might start coming back for more…and that would be bad.
12. Rob | July 30th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Salesguy to businessman: “What site would you rather invest your ad dollars in Mr. Local Businessman? The competition’s lame website or our site which was featured on the homepage of CNN.com last week?”
Sales people can come up with ways to monetize out-of-town traffic to benefit both the local advertiser and their own sales.
13. Joe | July 30th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
The “dirty little secret” is that you’ll get tons of these links if you’re an IB station. Go ahead, cheack all the links. How many of those “affiliates” are IB stations?
It just so happens that CNN is a part owner of IB. Humm…
14. Eric | July 30th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
I don’t get it…who are the CNN Newsource affiliates?
15. Tony Courtwright | July 30th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Salesguy to businessman: Here’s my offer - Buy one, get one FREE!
You pay a few $’s for the links, impressions and click throughs on my site and then because CNN and others love local news so much, your website will be spidered more frequently - giving you site higher organic search engine rankings.
Why pay for SEM on Google AdSense or Yahoo! Panama? Local news sites can deliver better organic rankings for free…
16. JC | July 30th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
My web content team has been submitting our best stories on a daily basis to the CNN.com Web desk since the beginning of the year. It’s no different than the assignment desk pitching your best on-air stories to CNN or their network.
The benefits we get from CNN outweigh any advertising related issues. Here’s why…
1) Getting a story on CNN.com is a *cool* thing. It makes the content team proud, and the reporter/crew who did the original story. It’s a good ego boost and helps showcase the importance of the web to the traditional newsroom staffers.
2) Better writing. The editors at CNN.com want to link to well written stories. My site competes with an IB station across town and they do a good job when it comes to writing a good web story. Our content producers are now more motivated to write a better web story than our competitors down the street.
As far as advertisers, if you have a good ad management system like DART, you shouldn’t have to worry about your ad impressions. If your orders are set up correctly DART should balance the load when it sees a spike.
You should look at CNN traffic as gravy and that’s it.
17. Anonymous | July 30th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
The industry bases its ad sales on CPM (cost per thousand) impressions, and impressions are in direct correlation to page views.
We’ve had the happen on our site a number of times with various different sites, and it’s only helped our online revenue generation.
The problems occur when you don’t get these bumps consistently and end up with huge variations in your page views/uniques from week to week… they get to be annoying to explain to management.
18. Winner | July 30th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
The Good: Higher site metrics leads to being on more advertising buys and they push you to the threshold of many national advertisers.
The Bad: Out of town traffic is not clicking on the local ads and thus increasing the likelihood of below average click-thru rates.
Personally, I would prefer to have the traffic. The best way to deal with the problem is to ensure that traffic from out-of-market-visitors sees ads from network advertisers or those through ad networks that buy and re-sell remnant inventory.
19. Glen | July 30th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Since when is it bad to have more eyeballs looking at your site? Personally, I don’t care where they come from.
Yes, it can negatively affect some site metrics, but not having an influx of traffic from external sources also negatively affects some site metrics, and I’d definitely rather have visitors than not have visitors.
I also don’t get the whole “but they’re not local” argument. The trick is figuring out how to monetize all traffic. Why would you want to throw away any visitors?
20. Tom Planchet | July 30th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
It’s never bad to have more traffic, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think the guy in Nebraska, coming to a local news site in Seattle for a video of a train wreck is going to ‘like what he sees’ and make a Seattle news site a regular stop.
The only exceptions to that would be former Seattle residents or fans of one of their sports teams.
There are very few local sites that can compete on a national level. We don’t have reporters out there…and that’s not our market (yeah, I know the world is our market, but outside of Katrina, why are people interested in New Orleans on a daily basis).
Now, I mentioned sports teams and you CAN become a destination for fans of your local pro or college teams. We have a beat writer here for the Saints and it’s upped our traffic for Saints news a lot…his stories have Googled higher and he’s regularly linked to by Saints and NFL blogs.
In short, it never hurts to have more traffic, but realize it for what it is…
21. Rick Ellis | July 30th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Here are a couple of other things to consider.
In theory, the best way to handle extra traffic from CNN or drudge or fark is to create a special page wrapper that is used when traffic comes from a particular domain or range of ip addresses.
It’s takes a bit of work. But if you deliver a page with other related stories and video (more wacky stuff if it’s a wacky story, maybe the previous stories you’ve done on this particular murder trial), you’re going to generate even more traffic.
Also, if the story is part of continuing coverage, offering visitors the chance to follow *just* coverage of that particular event with a special RSS feed or email list will drive some longer term traffic.
But the biggest reason to encourage these links is that it’s often very difficult to convince a regular viewer of channel 6 that they should visit the channel 9 web site. Having CNN drive that local viewer to your site is a good thing long term, and great promotion if you have the site to pull it off.
22. Joe Rosemeyer | July 30th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Why do we assume that no one who visits CNN.com comes from our local market? That’s just plain dumb. Our in-market visits have gone up considerably, and I don’t doubt I owe a portion of that boost to CNN.com’s referrals.
More exposure for the site is not a bad thing.
23. Tom Planchet | July 30th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Good point Joel…
24. dave f | July 30th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
I fell like through #18 this discussion is stuck in a 90’s time warp. CNN links are good because it increases your visibility. Subsequently, a ton of bloggers, newspaper sites and various other websites link to your story. That’s the basic SEO benefit, because that high PageRank CNN.com confers is gone once they pull that link.
If you can geo-target, that out of DMA traffic won’t blow your local ads, so you are not losing advertiser value.
#21 is right in terms of an IP specific strategy. Figuring out how to monetize national traffic is the problem at hand, and whining about how it sucks won’t make it go away.You can tailor your content to out of market folks if you put a little effort in, but I’ll bet the vast majority of people in this business are constrained by corporate mandates and CMS’s.
Saying that your time spent and other similar metrics are blown out of proportion is just a matter of not having the right tools to parse the information.
The double edged sword is that as our sites all move towards more and more ‘hyper/super/extra/mega-local’ content, our national strategies fall by the wayside.
25. jayjay | July 30th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
In this climate, eyeballs count, no matter where they come from. Get the traffic in any way you can, and let the sales people figure out to monetize it. Who says, as others have pointed out, you can’t have a seperate strategy around links that come from external sites, like CNN, than you do from links that come off your mainsite? To me it makes sense to be thinking along both tracts. Anyone who doesn’t is living in another world, in my opinion.
26. Barney Lerten | July 30th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
We’ve had CNN, MSNBC and AOL links in recent weeks to some… unusual stories. The biggest eyeball-bringer?? AOL Health! (Pointing to our story of a woman witha 140-lb. tumor). So there, all you AOL-haters - they still have LOTS of traffic worth getting a piece of.
In Google Trends comparisons, we WAY topped the daily paper here for daily uniques when that hit! You think I’m gonna quibble with that for one nanosecond? It’s nice to have, and I’ll keep looking for things they might be interested in;-)
27. John P. Wise | July 31st, 2008 at 4:35 pm
You’d think since LR is followed by more editorial people than sales&marketing folks that there would be more than just one person out of the first 26 commenters to write something like this:
“2) Better writing. The editors at CNN.com want to link to well written stories. My site competes with an IB station across town and they do a good job when it comes to writing a good web story. Our content producers are now more motivated to write a better web story than our competitors down the street.”
To steal a line from G. Gordon Liddy in Fletch, “C’mon guys, it’s so simple. Maybe you need a refresher course.” JC in comment No. 16 still believes in good, old-fashioned writing, and I do too. Do it well, get some extra mileage out of CNN.com occasionally and then follow jayjay’s advice in No. 25: “Let the sales guys figure out to monetize it.”
Seriously, words like metrics and monetize certainly have their place, but let those colleagues with the SUVs in the parking lot be the ones to use them. We should just worry about making the front end look chock full of good content, and if someone wants to pick our stuff up, all the better.
28. Barney Lerten | July 31st, 2008 at 11:43 pm
You have the right last name, John. (Yes, I avoided the Wise guy crack. Oh, maybe I didn’t;-)
Content - good, well written, local content, presented attractively - is still king IMHO. All the rest is icing, but who eats icing without a cake?;-)
29. Bryan Harris | August 1st, 2008 at 8:14 am
If you only want a local audience, why not just buy a billboard?
“Local” websites are competing for eyeballs against “national” websites. Your website might have the best local church picnic story ever written, but if a site 5,000 miles away has exclusive footage of a tsunami, that’s where your “local” audience will be looking on their lunch hour.
What’s more: Not only is Rosemeyer right that local people go to CNN.com, local advertisers are also interested in reaching a world-wide audience. National brands, regional advertisers (notice the author didn’t mention that most of those CNN links are divvied up by region on the /US page…), and the tourist industry all have deep pockets and a desire to reach people outside of a confined area.
What’s dirty and secret about wanting to reach more people in the media business?
30. Arul Sundaram | August 1st, 2008 at 11:24 am
@Rick - great points, as usual.
@Don Day - I’m not sure if this is just a CNN.com issue. Same thing is occurring with Yahoo - any site that gets featured via Yahoo! Buzz (or just local stories that make it onto Yahoo! News) see similar “national” traffic spikes.
Overall, I agree with tdc - the issue of national traffic has been a topic for a while. It’s up to us (the industry) to figure out how to monetize / get value out of it. The debate over whether or not it is good is moot.
31. Derrick Gray | September 17th, 2008 at 6:52 am
Don,
Enlighten me, We are constantly hearing from the McCain camp that Palin is and Energy Expert….where’s the proof?
Sitting on an ethic board doesn’t make you and expert. Being Governor and chairing a board for less than 20 months doesn’t make you and expert. Energy is very complex. This is the question that should be asked with specifics not rhetoric.
Thanks
32. Derrick Gray | September 17th, 2008 at 6:57 am
Don,
Enlighten me, We are constantly hearing from the McCain camp that Palin is and Energy Expert….where’s the proof?
Sitting on an ethic board doesn’t make you an expert. Being Governor and chairing a board for less than 20 months doesn’t make you an expert. Energy is very complex. This is the question that should be asked of Palin….with specifics not rhetoric.
Duplicate blog (last had typo errors sorry)
33. Anis | November 5th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Friend show, art simply super
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