Heaton: ‘Kicking butt with Continuous News’

LR Blogger Emeritus (and my business partner for three years) Terry Heaton writes about why Continuous News is the way to go in his blog entry “Kicking butt with Continuous News.” Continuous News, for the uninitiated, is the publication of news as it comes in, rather than in the traditional style of having a conventional lead and updating the site after newscasts. The concept was met with plenty of skepticism when Terry pioneered it three years ago, but the success of WLEX’s lex18.com since switching to continuous news speaks for itself:

“(WLEX) hit 9,000,000 page views for 2010 at the end of February, already over one-third of the site’s total in all of 2009. The growth has been absolutely explosive over the past two months as users have caught on to the model. The bounce rate is under 50%, unique visitors total 726,000 for the year — the vast majority from the DMA — and the most fascinating statistic of all is that those users spend an average of almost 6 minutes on each visit…. Continuous News is sold by daypart, with advertisers paying a premium for ads during three traffic peaks throughout the day, roughly 8 a.m. to 9 a.m., 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.”

The style is blog-format, yet it goes beyond what people think of when they hear “blog.” It is built for the way people consume news, especially during the day. It gives people a reason to keep returning to the site. And although I am especially biased on this topic, the numbers make it clear that Terry’s concept works.