There was a lot of fuss about Compete.com’s numbers on Twitter.com visits slowing, as reported by Mashable. I decided to use Compete.com to check on some of the local news sites and see how they are doing. If the site’s stats are accurate, it means that StarTribune.com’s unique and overall visits have been slipping since January. The overall visits have also been declining from 5.5 million in March to 4.6 million in May.


It could just be a summer-slowdown, since the numbers in May 2008 were at 4.3 million visits. And according to Nielsen Online Global Index, people visited fewer websites from March to April. So the slowdown is not surprising. Twincities.com also had a slight decrease in overall visits (1.036 million in April and 1.034 million May), with an increase in unique visits. Below is a comparison of overall visits (closer view) between the two news sites:

Some of the local broadcast sites, like KARE11, had an increase in both overall and unique visits, while WCCO had an increase in overall numbers with a decrease in unique visits, which means their core users came back to the site more in May. Unique visits and overall visits for KSTP.com were down.

Fox9 at myfoxtwincities.com saw a slight increase in both unique and overall visits, but whose total numbers are still fewer than KARE11 and WCCO: