Media Try Mobile, Hyperlocal To Win In Miami
In Miami, you can have a lunch of ropa vieja with a Cuban exile in Little Havana, then spend the night flitting between trendy bars and restaurants in South Beach, hoping to land a sighting of LeBron James or Jennifer Lopez. So it’s not surprising that online media in this market of 4.4 million is a diverse and sometimes spicy stew.
The biggest players are newspaper websites operated by The Miami Herald and Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel.
Added to the mix are the Herald’s Spanish-language ElNuevoHerald.com, sites for the three major TV networks plus Fox, an alternative weekly site with a large following, and the cacophonous chatter of more than 100 sometimes scrappy bloggers.
Oh, and the Huffington Post arrived last November with a local section devoted to Miami, offering up Arianna’s titillating take on the area’s news.
According to comScore, Sun-Sentinel.com — not the Miami newspaper site — leads here. The site’s 404,000 unique visitors edged out MiamiHerald.com’s 385,000 uniques in October, comScore said. (If the Herald’s Spanish-language site, which had 56,000 uniques, is added to its total, Miami takes the lead.)
The city’s TV sites form a pack far behind, according to the comScore numbers. WFOR-TV’s Miami.CBSlocal.com, WTVJ-TV’s NBCmiami.com, Post-Newsweek-owned WPLG-TV’s Local10.com (ABC) and Sunbeam Television’s WSVN.com (Fox) lured from 113,000 to 159,000 unique visitors, comScore reports.
MiamiNewTimes.com, the site for the Village Voice Media weekly, does almost as well, attracting 107,000 uniques in October, according to comScore.
Folks at the Herald and some other sites here question the comScore numbers.
Alex Fuentes, general manager for interactive at Miami Herald Media Co., citing data from analytics company Omniture, said the Herald site instead averaged 6 million unique visitors per month during 2011, with 26.4 million monthly page views. [Updated to reflect the monthly averages for the year.]
While the industry is clearly grappling with how to standardize audience measurements, comScore’s relative size rankings seemed roughly in line with those from observers in the market.
The newspaper sites have so great an edge because they started earlier and because the TV sites haven’t been creating a lot of online-only news, said Suzanne Levinson, an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Miami who works in Web development and design for the Herald company.
In the Miami market, which covers both Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, readership is divided not only between English and Spanish speakers. There are also those who speak Creole or Portuguese.
Almost $1.2 billion in local ad spending is at stake here, $183.1 million of it in the form of online ads, according to Borrell Associates, a media consulting firm.
With so many players fighting over an audience fragmented by culture and language, “Miami is a difficult market,” said Jose Duran, Web editor at MiamiNewTimes.com.
The aggressively flashing ads on the Herald and — especially — the Sun-Sentinel sites speak to the effort made to survive.
Levinson admits her paper gets reader complaints about the ads. “We explain that we’re desperately trying to keep journalism alive in South Florida,” she said. The company sets limits on the number of ads that can blink or roll over on section fronts, she added.
Despite the competition, the paper collaborates with the Sun-Sentinel and The Palm Beach Post, a newspaper in a nearby market — sending a single reporter to routine events, then sharing the news, said Rick Hirsch, the Herald’s managing editor.
Different sites here are trying different strategies to prosper. At the Herald, the bet is on growing audience by providing unique local content, said Hirsch.
MiamiHerald.com offers users 45 choices under community news, letting them click on various neighborhoods in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, as well as subject areas tailored to Haitians, moms or Orthodox Jews.
The site also provides links to a couple hundred area blogs via its blog directory, Hirsch said.
The paper’s push toward hyperlocal began two years ago, Hirsch said. But he allowed, “We have been more successful in driving traffic than [ad] revenue.”
Here as elsewhere, websites are seeing their mobile numbers explode.
Mobile page views grew 76% year-over-year at MiamiHerald.com, Fuentes said, and they increased 145% for ElNuevoHerald.com.
The Herald has subscription apps for iPad and several for iPhone. An iPad app for ElNuevoHerald recently joined the one already in existence for the English-language site, Hirsch said. A PDF edition of the paper was added for iPad in recent weeks, he said.
For iPad, the paper uses interstitial ads that pop up after a set number of stories are accessed by the reader, Levinson said.
The Herald has taken note of the fact that mobile traffic rises on weekends and during the evening and begun tilting the story mix to interests that dominate at those times, such as sports and entertainment, Hirsch said.
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