“Stickiness is like a compounded Internet interest rate: it measures how likely users are to visit, and how often they go beyond the first click to the second or third,” writes Matthew Hindman in a new paper for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. "Sites with above-average stickiness grow their audience share over time, by definition; those with below-average stickiness shrink.“

Generating compounded audience growth is the most urgent problem facing journalism today, according to the associate professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University and Joan Shorenstein Fellow, fall 2014.  His extensive research shows that audience growth is essential to a successful strategy for local digital news. 

What works when it comes to web traffic and stickiness? Hindman’s report focuses on newspapers. But “Stickier News, What newspapers Don’t Know about Web Traffic Has Hurt Them Badly—But There is a Better Way“ does offer some takeaways for increasing online audiences in general for local news. 

Hindman writes: “Growing local news audiences online boils down to two questions. First, how can we make news stickier compared to all of the other content – from Facebook to email to pornography to shopping to YouTube – that competes for users’ attention? Second, how can local news sites make themselves stickier compared to the large national news brands that soak up 85 percent of the news audience?” His suggestions include:

• Faster load times lead to higher traffic. Hindman notes that dozens of studies have replicated this result across different sites and diverse categories of content. 
• Beyond speed, site design and layout has a large effect on site traffic.  Research has shown that “site design and layout is used as a proxy for site quality and trustworthiness,” and can make a site easier to navigate which helps generate more return traffic.
• Sites with more content, more frequently updated, are much better at building traffic. This gives viewers a reason to check back.
• Optimize news sites for social media in order to boost readership. Many news sites find that Facebook is their single largest source of traffic.
• Multimedia content attracts more traffic than “plain-vanilla text” stories. Interactive elements and graphics, research shows, have long been associated with high levels of reader engagement.