‘Death’ of Rocky Mountain News Drives Traffic

The death of a newspaper is big news, also, ironically, it’s apparently great for website traffic.

Over at HuffPo Danny Shea crunched Rocky Mountain News‘ website numbers — turns out the site experienced a surge in visits in its final days last week.

Thursday, February 26 — when it was announced the Rocky would fold the next day — RockyMountainNews.com saw 250,000 unique visitors, well above its 12-month average of approximately 90,000 uniques a day

Whereas the site’s 12-month daily average was around 383,000, it served 1,130,797 pageviews on Thursday and 1,286,756 pageviews on Friday.

Now imagine if somehow that could be monetized. Or, you know, if newspapers could figure out how to attract that many people to their sites without having to close down to do so.

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