The publisher of Mother Jones, a non-profit news outlet based in San Francisco, can’t pinpoint exactly why February 2011 traffic to MotherJones.com surged 420 percent from February 2010′s number. But he can hint at the site’s sudden winter popularity.
“Our reporters kicked out stories people were interested in,” he says in an phone interview. “They hit the zeitgeist when it was hot.”
In February, the site raked in 3 million unique visitors. Pageviews increased by 275 percent – to more than 6.6 million – compared to a year ago. Mother Jones had never seen this kind of traffic before.
“But the real challenge is to keep the traffic up past February,” he says, “and we have our fingers crossed.” The company publishes a monthly magazine and also provides daily content on its website.
So what did Mother Jones do right? Known for their sharp political reporting, they expanded their Washington coverage and also covered the Wisconsin protests, with the latter articles attracting significant attention.
The news outlet also credits its “explainer” articles that offer comprehensive info on current affairs, such as the Nieman Labs sees value in this content: “…it’s news material catered to readers’ immediate need for context and understanding when it comes to complex, and time-sensitive, situations. The pages’ currency, in other words, is currency itself.”
Katz says February’s traffic spike should also be credited to their embrace of social media. One of the first alt-news companies to go online in the late 1990s, Mother Jones now asks all its writers to use Twitter and Facebook to engage with their readers. The strategy seemed to have culminated with glowing stats last month: membership to its MotherJones.com’s traffic came from social media sites, nearly three times the amount attracted in the same period in 2010.
“Twitter and Facebook communities turned out to be interested communities in their own right,” Katz notes.
Social media integration is all well and good, but if they don’t point to compelling articles, what’s the point? Luckily for Mother Jones, readers were driven to stories they cared about, as evidenced by the 630 comments in Kevin Drum’s article on “What Wisconsin is Really About.”
You might recall Mother Jones won the “Colbert bump” due to their income inequity charts being featured on the Comedy Central show The Colbert Report; but that occurred on Mar. 1, after the February traffic numbers were collected.
Katz says February wasn’t the only highlight of the traffic success story. In fact, 2010 was a record year for Mother Jones: monthly page views and unique visitors to MotherJones.com in 2010 increased by more than 50 percent over the previous year, a press release states.
“We still have so much to learn,” Katz says, before offering some advice to news sites in a similar position. “It’s smart to invest in digital early, and to really invest in social media to see where it’ll take you.” Katz also commended their decision to give full-time reporting decisions to writers providing content instantly for the website and later for the print publication.
“Our staff are comfortable working in a digital environment,” he adds.
Katz doesn’t see a big traffic drop coming soon; in fact, he envisions steady growth, thanks to early GOP meetings to determine the front-runner in the 2012 primaries.
The area Mother Jones is most cautiously circling is mobile, Katz reveals. They optimized their website for smartphones but they have yet to launch a dedicated iPhone or iPad app. “We’re not sure if there will be financial gain for us [to invest in mobile] so there has to be another reason for us to move in that direction.”
For more information on Web, technology and business trends affecting media, visit our sister site Future of Media.
