According to a recent report from the FCC, local news outlets receive a paltry amount of online traffic compared to sites with a national or international profile. In a typical market, local news sites get less than one half of one percent of total pageviews.
However, according to a recent analysis of local web usage by the Nieman Journalism Lab, there are a handful of markets where local news sites gain a significant amount of online traction in the community.
Nieman used data compiled by George Washington University researcher Matthew Hindman to create a list of the markets that generated the most pageviews per web user per month to local news sites.
The market with the most local pageviews per web user? That would be Salt Lake City. An outlier in Nieman’s analysis, Salt Lake City registered a whopping 89 pageviews per web user to local sites (for comparison, Los Angeles web users average 3.9 pageviews on local sites per month). Some of this traffic can be attributed to KSL’s investment in online classifieds, which generate 250 million pageviews per month.
A list of the top ten markets with the highest amount of local pageviews per user after the jump…
| Market | Pageviews per user per month to local news sites | ||||||||||||||||||
| SALT LAKE CITY | 89 | ||||||||||||||||||
| ROANOKE-LYNCHBURG | 31.8 | ||||||||||||||||||
| HARRISBURG-LNCSTR-LEB-YORK | 27.9 | ||||||||||||||||||
| CEDAR RAPIDS-WATERLOO&DUBQ | 26.4 | ||||||||||||||||||
| BATON ROUGE | 26.1 | ||||||||||||||||||
| SYRACUSE | 25.9 | ||||||||||||||||||
| PITTSBURGH | 25.3 | ||||||||||||||||||
| NEW ORLEANS | 24.8 | ||||||||||||||||||
| COLUMBUS, OH | 24.5 | ||||||||||||||||||
| GREENSBORO-H.POINT-W.SALEM | 24.3 | ||||||||||||||||||
Niemen’s full ranking of local markets can be found here.