Continuous News Works For WLEX-TV!
For years, AR&D’s 2.0 guru Terry Heaton has been espousing the value of offering continuous news on your TV station web site.  We touted the idea in our new book - “Live, Local, Broken News” - saying that a local TV station must be in the “Finished” (scheduled newscasts) news business, and the “Unfinished” (constantly updated news on the web, mobile devices etc.) news business at the same time.
Well, our Lexington client - WLEX-TV - has proven the value of continuous news in a big way. For the first three weeks of September, www.LEX18.com had been averaging a little over 52,000 page views a day by 19,000 visitors. The average time-on-site was 2-minutes-58-seconds.Â
LEX18 launched continuous news on September 22nd and from that day to the end of September the average time-on-site shot up to   4-minutes-46 seconds. That’s a whopping 215% increase!  The page views increased 36% to nearly 71,000 per day, and the number of daily visitors ballooned by 25%.  All this was done without an on-air marketing campaign.
LEX18 News Director Bruce Carter says they are still in the midst of training the entire news staff to contribute to their continuous news effort. Right now between 10-to-15 people write web stories on a daily basis and they average about 60 stories a day - with 90 being the most ever posted in one day.  Bruce says at this point about half of the staff has been trained.
Bruce says the really encouraging sign of the power of continuous news driving web traffic and time spent on the site, is that there have not been any big news stories so far. They are making these gains without one huge story driving people to their site.
On Friday, October 2nd, WLEX promoted their continuous news for the first time with a spot that encourages viewers to “Log on and leave it on, all day long.” Friday’s time spent on site zoomed to an average of 6-minutes-1 second - the highest so far. On Saturday the time-on-site was a very strong 5-minutes-48-seconds.
Carter expects those numbers to keep rising once the entire news staff is trained and posting stories. Check out the site for yourself at www.LEX18.com - the colorful headline banners catch your attention - and the continuous river of news keeps you reading for a long time.
Jim
This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Willi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 5th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
It’s a great idea.. but from a user perspective I have to say it falls flat.
The idea of using the news brand is to give news value to certain stories or items on a site…
A continuous news blog makes the user scroll forever to figure out what is happening.
In fact, it removes the entire value proposition behind a news website operated by an existing brand.
The value LEX brings is that it has the skills to help regular folks understand the news.
This way of “unorganizing” the news removes that and gives users ONE LESS reason to even bother going to the site.
Would WLEX create a newscast on TV that puts stories in the order in which they happened that day? of course not!
so, why does it work for a website? it doesnt.
it seems neat. and it DOES make it easier for the staff to update.
but, from a user perspective it is a train wreck.
oh, and the time on site number has done up because the auto refresh is set faster… or the previous site did not have a feature.
we all know how this is done.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Jim,
Do you see a day, where when anchors like myself come into work, we just go sit on set and work off laptops and as news rolls with video etc…we record clips, intros tags etc that post immediately to the web? Seems like that day is fast approaching.