I've been a little bit obsessive over the past few days in my monitoring of the traffic patterns at PatsPapers.com. The key to the success of the Web site, obviously, is to generate enough traffic that we can afford to do this each day. I was surprised yesterday afternoon by a big spike in visits at about 4 pm.

Turns out Gothamist and New York magazine both discovered Pat's Papers yesterday, and posted prominent items online. Apparently they have a lot of readers, many of whom are also regular viewers of NY1.

Some of the new visitors to Pat's Papers sent inquiries about what time the report is going to be updated each day. The answer is: probably not as early as you'd like. Two hangups: one is the overall availability of the newspapers we review. The other is the production process. Neither happens as quickly as I'd like. The goal for now is to have the report live, with complete production, at about 11 am.

I'm toying with a way to create an "early edition." This would be an audio only version and it may be possible to have it online two hours ahead of the video report. That still puts us somewhere around a 9 am debut, which is later than I would like it to be up. The national report is just a much larger undertaking than the NY1 "In the Papers" segment. (The NY1 report is faithfully on TV at 7:42 each morning, and is online a short time later.)

Labels: Early Edition, Gothamist, In the Papers, NY1, NYmag.com