• Markets
• Economy
• Federal Reserve
• Housing
• Energy
• Digital Media

Market Events & the Blogosphere

I'm heading into the office, so I won't get to GDP until later today. I wanted to get to a comment in a post last night that asked "How big was spike in site traffic today?"

That's a fascinating question, and it raises all sorts of interesting issues: What is the role of blogs in reporting/commenting on fast breaking news events, what does this mean for the role of the mainstream media, is this a significant realignment, etc.

To answer the initial question: Traffic went up about 80% as compared to our typical weekday, and up about 50% relative to the past 5 weekdays. Between 15-20k individuals swing by here most work days, and these folks view about 25k pages. Yesterday, about 31k people came buy and looked at almost 46,000 pages. (You can play with the various ways of depicting stats over at sitemeter).

Weekly Unique Visitors and Page Views

As far as the MSM is concerned, there are numerous ways to intepret this. On the one hand, many readers rely on blogs as a filter for the MSM: I don't buy into the argument that blogs make the media redundant; My sense is that many readers think: Show me what I need to see, and save me the time of sifting thru 100s of other sources. A post like this morn's Around the World in 24 Hours is just that sort of overview. For many news consumers, media is important, with blogs acting as a filter/redirector.   

Yet at the same time, most of the generation born after the 1987  crash doesn't like to get ink on their hands. They get nearly all of their news from the web, and almost never touch a physical paper.

I don't reach any major conclusions on this, other than noting the MSM needs to stay interactive to remain relevant to its future consumers. Media is clearly in a period of transition, and how they handle it will determine how relevant -- and profitable -- they will be in the future . . .   

>

UPDATE: February 28, 2007 10:29am

Most of the market related blogs are reporting a 50% in traffic yesterday, with several noting all time page view highs  . . .

Wednesday, February 28, 2007 | 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBack (1)
add to de.li.cious | digg this! | add to technorati | email this post

Comments

I had the exact same thing happen to me (albeit in much smaller numbers), with today looking at even more traffic. Certainly suggests that yesterday's events piqued people's interest (I'd say my readers were looking for a reaction vis-a-vis the yen carry trade, for example...)

Posted by: Macro Man | Feb 28, 2007 9:40:03 AM