Mobile Traffic Spikes in Oklahoma City
Oklahoma might seem more about wheat fields and gas wells than life on the cutting edge. But if “cutting edge” in media is now mobile, Oklahoma City has arrived.
At the market’s dominant home-grown news site, The Oklahoman’s NewsOK.com, mobile traffic raced up 50% to 70% over the past year, growing much faster than the web site, according to digital managing editor Alan Herzberger.
Over at KFOR, the NBC affiliate owned by Local TV LLC, the move was even more dramatic. Mobile page views passed those for the website in June and have held the lead ever since, said Brian White, interactive director there. Mobile page views now stand at 4 million per month, versus the website’s 3 million, he said.
Although East Coast sites had started seeing mobile supremacy, White said he didn’t expect this to happen in the Great Plains until 2012. “It has rapidly shifted to mobile. It’s been mind-numbing how quickly that has happened.”
It’s a similar story at other sites in this market of 1.8 million people, which, according to Borrell Associates, has a so-so 30-day internet access rate of 70.8%.
Mobile has gone “through the roof” at KOCO.com, the market’s leading TV site, according to Ryan Welton, digital media manager at the ABC affiliate.
About 208,000 unique visitors logged onto KOCO.com in September, according to comScore Inc., a company that tracks Web traffic.
That’s less than the 240,000 monthly uniques comScore reported for the newspaper’s NewsOK site. But it topped the 177,000 for CBS affiliate KWTV's news9.com and the 90,000 for third-place KFOR.com, according to comScore.
With so much growth coming from mobile, it’s not surprising that Oklahoma City sites say they are focusing their efforts there. The challenge, said KFOR’s White, is making mobile pay.
According to Borrell Associates, local advertisers will spend almost $445 million in this market in 2011, and that will almost triple — rising to $1.2 billion — by 2016. The online piece of that pie will grow faster than offline, going from just under $86 million this year to more than $263 million by 2016, according to Borrell.
But while the experts predict mobile ad dollars will outpace those from the Web by 2014, “It’s just not bringing in the money yet,” said White.
Though KFOR has more mobile page views than Web views to sell now, more ad revenue still comes from the Web, he said. Revenue per mobile page view is only 25% to 35% what the website’s pages bring in, he said.
Media companies, already starved by the shrunken ad rates that have come with the shift from legacy to the Web, might view this new adjustment as a bit alarming.
But White said he is not worried. It will just take creative thinking to turn the smartphone’s four-inch screens into effective advertising money-makers, he said.
KFOR has already begun to make this happen, he said. An ongoing mobile ad campaign offers prizes to Facebook users who lure the most Facebook “fans” for KFOR advertisers, he said. At $3,000 per weekly contest, advertisers have been snapping them up, bringing in $40,000 in ad revenue per fiscal quarter, White said.
At the same time, KFOR’s parent company is gearing up to roll out upgraded mobile apps, hiring a new third-party vendor and moving to a new mobile platform, he said. The change-over, expected early next year, will allow KFOR to have run-of-site mobile ads, giving it greater placement flexibility. The overhaul will make it possible to accommodate more than one ad per mobile page, and ads can be rotated on and off the page, he said.
Mobile isn’t the only story here.
In September, The Oklahoman announced that more than a century of Gaylord family ownership would end with the October sale of the newspaper’s holding company, OPUBCO, to a Denver firm owned by Phillip Anschutz. Anschutz, a billionaire who avoids the press, has interests ranging from oil and gas to real estate to telecommunications and even sports, with ownership of the Los Angeles Kings hockey franchise and part-ownership of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team.
The sale has brought no major changes, Herzberger said.
The Oklahoman’s management structure hasn’t changed, noted Kenna Griffin, an assistant professor of mass communications at Oklahoma City University, and the Anschutz Corp. has said it will leave it intact.
Derided as “the worst newspaper in America” in a 1999 Columbia Journalism Review article, the conservative Oklahoman has the best site here when it comes to breaking news, Griffin said. The paper’s mobile app is good and provides a way to dodge all the advertising “bells and whistles” that greet users on the main site, she added.
The paper joined Apple Newsstand in October, Herzberger said, making daily downloads automatic so it is easier for users to get daily access and also to pay for the paper’s app. QR codes have been added to the print edition, he continued, allowing print readers to use their iPhones or iPads to call up and view video.
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