The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

TBD D.C.-area news site not a steady riser in early Alexa stats. But let’s wait for the full story

I’ve been root­ing for TBD, the D.C.-area hyper­local news site that some jour­nal­ists regard as a savvy canary in the coal mine. Will fre­quent updates and a link-heavy neighborhood–by-neighborhood approach, tied in with local blog­gers, be the future of met­ro­pol­i­tan news? I really hope this exper­i­ment works, just as I wish suc­cess to other hyper­locals in the D.C. area and elsewhere.

So how is TBD doing, accord­ing to Alexa.com, which among other things mea­sures sites by the “Per­cent­age of global Inter­net users who visit”?

Well, fol­low­ing a debut on the morn­ing of August 9, TBD would appear not to be enjoy­ing a steady rise in traf­fic from world of mouth, if Alexa is on the mark. Alexa might be all wet. Alexa is not nearly as accu­rate as inter­nal mea­sure­ments based on coun­ters embed­ded in Web pages. We’re a long way from the full story. And remem­ber, too, the day-of-the-week fac­tor to con­sider when ana­lyz­ing traf­fic for a news-sports-weather-and-traffic site.  For comparison’s sake, the above Alexa chart also picks up stats for the Web side of the Wash­ing­ton City Paper, which needs a lot fewer vis­i­tors to turn a profit.

I’ll alert my TBD con­tacts and see if peo­ple there can share more mean­ing­ful data and com­ment on the Alexa stats. Do they have any sign that imme­di­ate word of mouth is kick­ing in despite the above chart? How do the stats com­pare with expec­ta­tions? Can TBD pro­vide traf­fic stats of its own, the more sig­nif­i­cant inter­nal ones? Keep in mind that even most major sites get off to slow starts—and, again, the seri­ous lim­i­ta­tions of Alexa, which is far from scientific.

What­ever the num­bers, my the­ory is that TBD can grow traf­fic by being less DC-centric and offer­ing more cov­er­age of, say, the Wash­ing­ton sub­urbs, where, not so coin­ci­den­tally, I live (Alexan­dria). I still won­der if TBD and allied oper­a­tions have enough staffers to do the job right, even with a link-heavy approach.

Update: 9:39 p.m.: Speak­ing of geog­ra­phy, I don’t see a sin­gle Vir­ginia story at the top of the TBD home page unless you count the weather update—even though I’ve been told that all TBD read­ers see the same main sto­ries at the top. Doesn’t Vir­ginia exist, too? Within Vir­ginia, the most pop­u­lated county is Fair­fax and within the county, schools are topic #1 or close to it. But a quick and hardly infal­li­ble search of Google Blogs doesn’t exactly turn up an abun­dance of school-focused blog­gers in Fair­fax County. Maybe instead of build­ing TBD’s blog net­work around the exist­ing sup­ply and dis­tri­b­u­tion of blog­gers in the D.C. area, TBD should train new blog­gers from the ‘burbs who are knowl­edge­able about key top­ics like schools.I’ve heard of a for­mer ABC pro­ducer in Reston who’s a PTA mom fix­ated on local test scores. Talk about a poten­tial blog­ger for TBD or other sites want­ing to do jus­tice to the Fair­fax County pub­lic schools! This is how to boost TBD’s numbers.

Update, 10:08: The TBD iPhone app is in the App Store.

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