Sporting News/AOL Fanhouse

I have to mention this: Just last week I was told that over the past 12 months FanHouse's organic traffic (people who came straight to FanHouse, not via AOL) went from 10 percent to 50 percent.

 

I think the idea that people only go to AOL or Yahoo because of their portals is silly. I never went to Yahoo for sports news before they hired a solid crew that began producing quality content, and likewise, I never went to AOL Sports for any reason before I started noticing over the past year or so that Fanhouse was starting to crank out quality original material.

 

I'm not saying what you're saying isn't valid, but your reason for visiting someplace, and the reasons for a vast majority of the consumer public, might be two different things. That portal traffic does make a big difference with the masses.

 

It's good for Fanhouse that its organic traffic has grown, but that statistic is meaningless without more information. Does it mean half of the 2.9 million people going to Fanhouse each month arrived from somewhere other than AOL? Or does it simply mean the non-AOL portion of Fanhouse's traffic grew by 50 percent?

My guess is it's likely the latter. You have to figure that the AOL traffic would stay constant. Then if there was this big surge of outside traffic the overall traffic number would have to be much higher than it is.

 

I dont know that one.

It's 10 million a month for FanHouse. 2.9M is sportingnews.com

 

I hate to pick on Patch, and I have friends who work there, but this is an example of why it fails, if it does.

http://ballston.patch.com/articles/capitals-struggle-to-find-offense-fall-to-rangers-in-shootout

You are a hyper-local site. Yes, the Caps practice and train in Ballston, but NO ONE is going to Patch.com to read about the Caps, especially a fourth-rate Caps story. Poor news judgment, poor writing, poor everything. If they hire quality people who would know that story has no place on their site, they might be a bit better off.

 

Say what you want but you have to admit that Patch site hired a snappy looking editor.

 

We have a relatively new local Patch site run by the guy who used to cover our town for the starvation-wages weekly. He's doing a solid job so far, but I wonder about burnout with little or no backup.

I'm rooting for him because I root against the starvation-wages weekly, which sucks and represents just about everything bad in journalism, albeit on a micro level.

 

We have one nearby - some of us wonder if that's how she got the job.
The Patch in the town where I work is pretty solid, albeit patchy (so to speak) on sports. It's believed to be the only Patch in the country that's incorporated a pre-existing online local news outlet.

 

It looks like that local Patch is trying to get on the mom's trend because mom's just need a local place to trade recipes and bitch about their lives. I know my old chain tried that with limited success and Gannett has tried it as well.

Read the bio of the writer of the Caps gamer. He's just as bad as a BR fanboi.

As other people have said, Patch is hit-or-miss with a lot of misses.

 

She is pretty cute looking -- certainly better than Michelle Bachmann.

Weird that her profile has her answering questions about her political & religious beliefs. It looked like a dating profile.

And, I agree that there's no reason to be writing gamers.

Better off writing about what' happening at the practice facility. Does the team ever have open practices? (The Rangers used to when I was a kid and I went a couple of times.) Do the players accessible at the practice rink? Do they sign autographs on the way in/out?