My 2006 prediction to save traditionnal media : You have to open up your archive !

Here a small part of a canadian media study I work on since a few weeks:

In the red corner : Canada.com (CanWest Global Communications Corp is one of the biggest media in Canada );

* Victoria Times Colonist
* Vancouver Province
* Vancouver Sun
* Edmonton Journal
* Calgary Herald
* Regina Leader-Post
* Saskatoon StarPhoenix
* Windsor Star
* Ottawa Citizen
* Montreal Gazette
* Dawson Creek
* Fort St. John
* Kamloops
* Kelowna
* Nanaimo
* Prince George
* Prince Rupert
* Trail
* Lethbridge
* Red Deer
* DOSE
* Vancouver Island Newspapers
* VANNET Newspapers

And the city guides :

* Victoria
* Vancouver
* Edmonton
* Calgary
* Regina
* Saskatoon
* Winnipeg
* Windsor
* Hamilton
* Toronto
* Ottawa
* Montreal
* Halifax
* Dawson Creek
* Fort St. John
* Kamloops
* Kelowna
* Nanaimo
* Prince George
* Prince Rupert
* Trail
* Lethbridge
* Red Deer

Total of indexed pages for all thoses newspapers and guides :874,000 pages in Google with the exception of Astrology who is under a different domain name.

Estimate traffic for all of the network : three million unique visitors a month.
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In the blue corner : LeDevoir (Small independant Quebec Newspapers with less than 30,000 daily copies)

* www.ledevoir.com

Total of all the pages indexed : 1,160,00 pages in Google for this unique newspapers

Traffic only from Google in december 2005 : 641,520 visitors

Estimate traffic for this newspapers : At least 1,25 million unique visitors a month.

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Conclusion : The tradionnal media have to open up their archives. The newspapers Ledevoir.com site have mixed articles, some are totaly free and some other are lock and give only one or two sentenses of the articles for free. But after a while, all thoses articles are crawlable by search engines thru 2002, and that's why this small media business have a unique and very performant model on the web.


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