Friday, February 20, 2009

All the news that's fit to.... blog?

Mike may be considering dropping his subscription, but at least a few others were reading the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in January. I suspect it wasn’t for the soccer coverage, or lack thereof.

According to a trade publication Editor and Publisher, the Post-Gazette is among the top 30 newspaper web sites in the US. They also show that web traffic on the Post-Gazette’s web site was up 47% in January from a year earlier. It wasn’t the single biggest jump in web traffic among that list, but it was one of the larger increases. A sign of a vast improvement of the PG’s web site? There is this little matter of a football game in January.

A glimmer of hope for the ink biz? or is it the light in the tunnel that becomes the oncoming train?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Steelers going to the superbowl and Pitt Panthers ranked #1 for a few weeks...

However I know everyone in my family that no longer lives here checks the PG site at least a few times a week.

Anonymous said...

Our site www.pghtech.org/careers (notice the "careers") was up almost the same amount in January. Chris, could it have been: the Steelers? the cold? the layoffs?

Interestingly I see that we have almost the same % of new visitors to the entire site (not just the careers extension) for Jan. Steelers again?

Audrey Russo

Mike Madison said...

Train. Does the website make money?

Anonymous said...

Agree it is a Train. I would be really surprised if the site made any money - the advertising is not location based (I am sure Pour House in DC would advertise if they knew you were in DC), Nor is it integrated into the content and basically old skool CPM...

However the PG could really take advantage of the Diaspora. They are in the best position to network the out of towners. To that end the PG Facebook group only has 15 members

Anonymous said...

What do you mean when you say that the web site is a train? Is that some sort of new internet buzzword?

C. Briem said...

train... tunnel... as in light getting larger. A very pre-Internet metaphor.

Can't speak to the tech council web site.. Although I imagine that nationwide recession is causing lots of traffic to go up for all career/professional and related sites especially for folks from elsewhere looking for jobs in Pittsburgh.. I'd say the detail diagnostics of who is hitting the site could provide some insights into what is driving the trend, but it could be lots of things. The context of this post the interesting question would be how well the tech council's site is doing compared to similar sites in other regions.