Recently, during one of my standard presentations to a group of prospective broadcast clients and TV news analysts, I asked what I thought to be a relatively easy question: "What's the number one trafficked site on the web, excluding the social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc...?"

I was surprised that nobody seemed to know the answer. So I gave it - Yahoo! - and asked a follow-on question, "How much monthly traffic in page views does Yahoo get?"

A few brave souls ventured a guess ... "20 million?" or "200 million?" they asked. As I kept urging them to guess higher, one fellow near the back of the room finally got up the guts and ventured (as though he could hardly believe he was throwing out such a big number), "2 billion?"

When I answered that, according to easily found site traffic ratings, the network of Yahoo! sites get about 45 to 50 billion page views per month, the audience seemed to be in shock. My sense is that they were too used to hearing stats such as "WXYZ.com gets 10 million page views per month" that they didn't realize that (for most DMAs) 10 million page views per month is a drop in the bucket as far as overall web traffic from that DMA goes. Further, most local broadcasters and newspaper owners have focused almost exclusively on showing growth in local revenue (and, unfortunately, have typically fudged their revenue numbers by including 'convergent revenue' rather than pure Web revenue) without addressing the underlying issue of growth in traffic.

Follow through this "top down" analysis of Yahoo! website traffic to estimate how close your local newspaper, television, or radio website might be to matching Yahoo, Google, or MSN in overall page views:

• Yahoo gets about 45 billion page views per month (conservatively)


• Of that traffic, roughly 70% is from international users (so only 30% of Yahoo traffic is from the USA).


• The population of the United States is roughly 300 million people.


• Therefore, Yahoo gets about 50 page views per month for every man, woman, and child in the United States.


• In a market such as, say, Atlanta (with roughly 2 million TV households and about 4.5 million people), this works out to over 220 million page views per month.


• In a DMA such as Madison, WI (about 700,000 people in the DMA), Yahoo likely drives about 35 million page views per month.

Keep in mind that these traffic numbers are just for Yahoo, and don't take into account MSN, Google Sites, the various social networking sites, Craigslist, etc..., which are all driving traffic and revenue from local markets.

As far as I know, the top TV station websites in the USA are KSL.com in Salt Lake and WRAL.com in Raleigh-Durham (each doing over 40 to 60 million page views per month, perhaps much more in certain cases). These sites might actually compare fairly well to Yahoo in overall page views. By my guess, Yahoo would get about 80 million page views per month from Salt Lake and over 100 million from Raleigh-Durham.

What these back-of-the-envelope calculations emphasize to me again is how important it is that local media sites evolve beyond "News, Weather, Sports, and Traffic" and actually create new content exclusively for the web and for their local communities. News-Weather-Sports only has a finite amount of traffic that it can drive, and it's not nearly enough to attract the advertisers needed to keep our businesses growing.

This is where programs such as YouNews(tm) and other vertical content channels fit into the picture for local media - these are new content and revenue sources that would never show up on-air or in-print, but are critical when it comes to providing innovative content and applications to local audiences. Fundamentally, it is applications such as these that will provide breakthrough traffic growth for local media sites - a key element for the future of local media if we are not going to give up all growth prospects to the major web portals.