I was finishing up a client's report on a well known art website and was thinking about what would drive traffic and then I read about Web Cartoon Bolsters Visits to Newsday and wondered if that kind of approach would work elsewhere.
I guess it would need to be "artfully" done.
"...Many people in the industry expressed surprise when, for the second consecutive month, Newsday.com ranked in the top five of the most visited newspaper Web sites, with 6.45 million unique visitors in December, an increase of 183 percent from the previous year, according to data from Nielsen Online.
Newsday’s online audience even surpassed The Wall Street Journal’s last month. For most of 2007, Newsday.com had two million to three million unique visitors a month, Nielsen Online data showed.
The huge jump was in large part attributed to the popularity of an animated cartoon by Walt Handelsman, an editorial cartoonist at Newsday who has won the Pulitzer Prize twice."
Now, there's a guy who's really earning his paycheck! I can't put up what on Newsday right now but here's an old animated cartoon by Walt Handelsman from 2006 to show you what I mean:
I wouldn't mind seeing the Web Analytics on Newsday, just so I could see where the traffic jump is coming from - but we know a lot of it is coming for the Animated Cartoon.
So what does that tell us - people get engaged when they're artfully entertained - and we need to be real, while we're at it - and it's hard for a lot of sites to grasp that.
Kudos to Newsday for getting this one right.
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