Who’s actually watching the TimesCast?

In the absence of any true market research on the subject, we’ve done our own guerrilla research. In the fall, we launched a MySpace page, which we’ve intermittently plugged on the webcast. We’ve quickly added more than 300 friends. Now, I can’t tell you that our MySpace friends are representative of our overall viewership. On the other hand, I can’t tell you they’re not. What I can tell you is that on some days our traffic coming through links on MySpace pages has been our second-biggest source of traffic (people finding the TimesCast on our own website ranks first, of course.)

And here’s something else I can tell you: Our MySpace friends tend to be single Roanokers in their late 20s. They skew somewhat female, with the women being about 26; the men just under 30.

In other words, our webcast has built a core following of exactly the type of people the print newspaper finds hardest to reach -- that fabled 18-to-34 market.
That seems a pretty good thing to me.

It’s also helped us make some changes to the TimesCast. We’ve added more entertainment. We’ve also added more news headlines -- on the theory that this is not a newspaper-reading audience. And it’s helped inform our choices on what type of news to include.

We also know most people are watching late in the afternoon, which suggests they're looking at it from work.

Intereresting footnote: On occasions when we've had a story -- or guest -- of specific interest to high school students, we've also see bumps in traffic after 8 p.m. My theory -- based on being the parent of a teen-ager -- is that that's when a lot of high school students are online, and spreading the word via email and MySpace. In fact, the first time we started seeing a lot of traffic come in through MySpace was when we had a high-profile story about three high school students charged with a crime. That night, traffic surged -- and a lot of it was coming in through MySpace links.

TimesCast mentions

• Poynter


• Howard Owens


• Lucas Grindley


• Flashcomguru


• CyberJournalist.net (Sports TimesCast launch)


• Lost Remote
• Journerdsim
• Rebuilding Media
• Nieman Reports
• ConVirgins
• Interactive Narratives
• Australian Newsagency Blog
• CyberJournalist.net (TimesCast launch)
• Ramblin' Prose
• News-Record.com Blog (Sister site to roanoke.com)

Related links:

• TimesCast profile on MySpace


• TimesCast on YouTube


• Photos from our first shooting in the new studio


• The Sports TimesCast (our spinoff)


• The Weather Journal


• MusicCast

• Share this entry
  • Digg this entry
  • Mark in Ma.gnolia
  • Tag with del.icio.us
  • Seed Newsvine
  • Post to Google
  • Add to Yahoo!
  • Share on Facebook
  • Submit to Reddit
  • Related at Technorati
• Posted by dwayne yancey in Multimedia
• :: Comments (0)