February 16, 2005

And The Busiest News Website In Tennessee Is...

Welcome Instapundit readers - this post has been heavily updated at the end. Please read the whole thing!

Thw two largest daily newspapers in Tennessee are the Memphis Commercial-Appeal and Nashville's The Tennessean. They each have large staffs of reporters and editors, and both have websites, at tennessean.com and GoMemphis.com. Meanwhile, the biggest news blog in the world is often said to be Instapundit.com. It is written, edited and published by one man, University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds in Knoxville.

Which of those three websites do you think has had more traffic, on average, over the past year? The answer - shockingly - is ...

...Instapundit, and by a wide margin.

Here's the Alexa traffic comparison of Instapundit and Tennessean.com. And here's the Alexa traffic comparison of Instapundit and GoMemphis.com.

Even more interesting - only 1 percent of viewers of GoMemphis.com visit its blog section, located at http://blog.gomemphis.com.

Now, what about teevee? Look at how Instapundit's traffic compares to the traffic on the website of WSMV, Nashville's NBC affiliate, as well as the CBS affiliate NewsChannel5 and the ABC affiliate WKRN. Actually, it's not so shocking for anyone who has ever had their blog's web address mentioned on a TV newscast, and also experienced an "Instalanche." One time my blog was mentioned on a WSMV newscast and linked to from the WSMV website, my blog got four visitors from that link. Four. Insta-links have sent my blog anywhere from 2,000 to 20,000 visitors.

When the mainstream media writes about blogs, they often portray blogs as parasitic on the the MSM. True, bloggers often write about the news media, or about stories covered by the news media, and link to and quote from those MSM reports.

But the blogosphere doesn't draw its traffic from the MSM's websites. In fact, it's rather more likely that if Tennessean.com or GoMemphis.com or WSMV.com linked to Instapundit, and Instapundit linked to a story on the newspapers' or teevee station's website, the visitor traffic would be headed mostly one way - from the blog to the MSM websites.

I don't know what The Tennessean charges for an ad on its website, but Glenn ought to charge more.

Back down to earth: HobbsOnline is a tiny blog compared to Instapundit - my daily visits count from SiteMeter, as of right now, average 1,381 per day over the last seven days, while Glenn's average is 163,108. My traffic doesn't reach the level of NashvilleCityPaper.com. But it's not far behind.

So...what does all this mean? For one, it means I'm probably underpricing ad space here at HobbsOnline. I'd love to know what Nashville City Paper charges to place a one-month ad on its website.

For another, it means that the mainstream media would be wise to cultivate relationships with bloggers, rather than attack them. MSM newspapers should encourage bloggers to link to stories, and teevee news stations should make their stories and video packages easily linkable. Both kinds of MSM ought to consider advertising on blogs - promoting their brands, their products and even their big scoops and investigative reports.

If I ran a local newspaper or a local television news operation, I'd be tracking down the biggest local blogs and negotiating a deal to run a standing ad on their each of their blogs. I envision an ad that carries the newspaper or station's name and logo and an automatically updated list of headlines or promos pulled from the news site's server. The cost to the news operation for such an ad likely would be fairly small in terms of their overall marketing budget, but huge to the local bloggers.

And if I ran a national publication, I'd be buying up ad space on Instapundit and a few other large blogs, as quickly as possible.

UPDATE: Via Memphis Mike Hollihan in the comments below, I find that the Memphis Commercial Appeal has moved its newspaper content to a different website, CommercialAppeal.com. Instapundit's traffic beats that website by a large margin, and only 2 percent of that website's traffic is drawn by its blogs section. Link to data in the comments below. It's worth noting that, via Memphis Mike's contribution, this post has been fact-checked and improved. As Hollihan exults, "Collaborative peer-reviewed journalism wins again." Blogs are fact-checked and errors corrected faster than in any other news media.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers! The future of blogs and journalism will be a hot topic at the BlogNashville conference May 5-7 .

Michael Silence, the in-house blogger of blogs at the Knoxville News Sentinel, comments that I'm comparing apples to oranges. Glenn Reynolds agrees - and provides a link to a very relevant piece by Stephen Green. I just sent Michael and Glenn the following email:

You both are right. I am comparing apples and oranges. News blogs aren't the same as a newspaper or TV news website. Apples and oranges? Sure. But people seem to prefer the apples to the oranges by a wide margin - they like their news filtered through blogs.

Back in the day, people trusted The New York Times because, well, it was The New York Times. "Paper of record" and all that. Today, do you trust The New York Times on every story, implicitly? I don't. I don't trust any media that way. As soon as I see a headline from the NYT or the Washington Post or CBS or some other part of the MSM, I immediately start thinking about which blogger is most likely to be dissecting that story today, drawing on the collective expertise of the blogosphere's bloggers and readers.

The Alexa data may be dubious but at least it is equally dubious for the newspaper sites and the blogs. I suspect almost any stats comparing news web sites and news blogs will find that blogs are winning - and will continue to do so for the forseeable future, as more and more people turn to them to filter and fact-check the mainstream media.