Tacos, elk sheds, and Facebook ads: How some local news sites saw their traffic spike

It’s time for our latest look at which newsrooms are having success increasing their web traffic. We bring you four of these each quarter, looking at four different market segments: local newspapers, nonprofit news outlets, public media stations, and for-profit local news sites.

Today’s edition looks at local for-profit news sites. (Eligible sites for this ranking are for-profit members of the trade group LION Publishers — LION standing for Local, Independent, Online News — so these are mostly digital-born newsrooms, not newspapers or TV stations.) The rankings for Q2 feature many of the same sites we told you about last time, like TAPinto, Oil City News, Muddy River News, and Lost Coast Outpost. This time, we’ve got details from local news sites in California, Illinois, Wyoming, and British Columbia. Below that are the Top 25 rankings for April, May, and June.

L.A. Taco

At L.A. Taco — which promises “street-level news stories that often cover L.A.’s most marginalized communities” — boomed 51% in May, and part of the explanation is right in the site’s name. May was the peak of the site’s annual Taco Madness event, which offers both an online 64-taco tournament and an in-person event that draws more than 2,000 people. “We love leaning into our roots and promoting small businesses that make delicious food with passion,” said publisher Alex Bloomingdale. (The winners: Los Dorados LA and Tacos Los Cholos.)

But the two biggest traffic drivers of the month were more electoral broccoli than birria de chivo. Two voter guides for L.A.’s June 2 election — one a detailed overview of the candidates’ positions, the other an interactive guide to all the endorsements made by 14 progressive organizations, noting which candidates were unanimous or consensus picks and where different groups were divided. It’s a nice reflection of the editorial approach of a site comfortable covering carne asada and ICE raids, lucha libre and the LAPD.

Energeticcity.ca

Energeticcity.ca has covered Fort St. John (you’ll never guess the city motto!) and the surrounding area in northeastern British Columbia since 2008. Its traffic in June was up 52% over May. Adam Reaburn, the site’s owner and general manager, cited a few high-performing stories and said the site’s been working on improving its SEO.

One twist: Because it’s a Canadian site, Energeticcity.ca can’t post its work on Facebook as a normal user. Three years ago, Meta banned Canadian news stories from its platforms in response to the Online News Act. So the only way for the site to put its stories in front of Canadians is buying a Facebook ad.

Facebook was often responsible for close to 40% of site traffic before the ban. Efforts to push readers to its newsletters and mobile apps have helped the site recover the lost visits. But now instead of posting to Facebook, Reaburn buys ads to reach its readers still on Facebook, “mainly to reach people who otherwise aren’t seeing our content anymore.”

“We’re honestly conflicted about it, because every ad dollar ultimately supports Meta, the same company whose ban cut us off in the first place,” he told me. “But we’ve decided it’s worth it if those ads convert Facebook users into newsletter subscribers, app users, or paying supporters, audiences we actually own rather than rent through a platform.”

The TRiiBE

In June, traffic to The TRiiBE, which covers the Black community in Chicago, spiked 65%. Tiffany Walden, the site’s cofounder and editor-in-chief, gave some of the credit to a profile of actor Cortez Smith, a West Side native who plays Nuck on “The Chi.” The site emphasizes cultural coverage in the summer months and this profile generated more than 20,000 pageviews.

“The TRiiBE strikes a balance between news and culture,” Walden said, “and we do that intentionally, as a way to showcase the multifaceted essence of Black Chicago.”

Buckrail

Buckrail, a site in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, saw its traffic jump 96% in April, and editor Marianne Zumberge credited an unusual source: the site’s tradition of running satirical April Fool’s Day stories. And these are very local April Fool’s Day stories, to the degree that some are almost incomprehensible to outsiders — like this year’s “Elk shed hunt canceled after researchers find mineral cure for CWB.” Or 2023’s “Bridger-Teton to utilize JHMR tram as migratory tool for bighorn sheep.” (Others are less opaque to us city dwellers, like “Flock of owls training to pick up litter in Yellowstone.”)

“They’re typically shared widely, which is fun,” Zumberge told me. “Apparently [this year’s elk-disease satire] was so convincing that people in the community still believe it to be factual. It got a lot of play.”

The Hendersonville Lightning

The Hendersonville Lightning covers a North Carolina mountain town of about 15,000 people, just south of Asheville. A typical story gets around 500 to 700 pageviews, according to editor and publisher Bill Moss. But its May traffic zoomed up 88% over April. The month’s top-performing stories were a pretty standard mix of local news (courts, zoning, crime), with No. 1 being about a record $101 million civil judgment in a suit over a retaining wall that collapsed onto construction workers in 2021.

Moss said he’s been surprised this year by unexpected traffic levels to seemingly garden-variety stories — like a Senate candidate’s campaign stop scoring 9,110 pageviews. The site’s daily newsletter is strong and growing, he said, and “we’re working on a new strategy to convert newsletter subscribers to paid consumers of the print and digital product.”