Traffic To theRoot.com Soars After Skip Gates’ Arrest
theRoot.com showed impressive editorial and marketing savvy with its coverage of the arrest Monday of Harvard University professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. No surprise there. Gates, one of America’s preeminent scholars, started theRoot.com with Donald E. Graham, chief executive of the Washington Post Co. The affiliation with Gates helped theRoot offer some of the best coverage of the incident, which drew national headlines.
The result was a huge spike in traffic for the site, which attracted more than 1 million unique visitors in June and figures to see that number grow. By mid-afternoon Tuesday, “the root” had become the 16th most searched phrase on Google, one of the best performances ever for an African-American oriented site.
Gates, the director of Harvard’s W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, was arrested Monday after returning to his home in Cambridge, Mass., from an overseas trip. A woman had called police after reporting seeing “two black males with backpacks on the porch” of a two-story home near the Harvard campus. It turned out that the two men were Gates and his driver, and Gates was merely trying to enter his home through a jammed front door. Police arrived and Gates was later charged with disorderly conduct after police claimed Gates confronted them.
The story quickly spread across the Internet, with supporters of Gates calling his arrest blatant racial profiling. The charges were soon dropped — but theRoot.com stayed all over the story with analysis, commentary and pictures. By mid-afternoon Tuesday, nearly 400 story comments had been placed by visitors to the site, and theRoot’s coverage was linked on social networking sites all across the Internet.
A big part of theRoot’s package was a statement from Gates’ attorney discussing the incident, and that piece likely led to the big spike in traffic. The site’s coverage was both superb and fair, as it took advantage of rare access and parlayed it into one of the biggest viral stories on the ‘net.
Category: Celeb 2.0, Diversity, social media, web 2.0 | Tags: Henry Louis Gates, henry louis gates jr, racial profiling, Skip Gates, theroot.com
About the Author I have been knocking around the digital world since, well, a very long time. I can remember watching AP stories crawl across the screen on 300-baud dial-up during the early days of Compuserve and Prodigy. And yes, I vividly remember those pay-by-the-hour days on AOL.
Since those early times I have held a variety of jobs in the interactive space, but I am probably best known for founding the original blackvoices.com. I raised $5 million in start-up money from Tribune Co. and hired a staff totaling nearly 40, with offices in L.A., Chicago and New York. Later, we sold the company to AOL, where it continues to thrive as one of the leaders in its category.
Today I am still active in the space consulting with folks on a variety of projects.
See all posts by Barry Cooper.
i think we need to be in better control of our attitudes and when we are not perfect then we need to man up and admit we overreact expecially when things are take to a level where it models to kids how to respond in similar situations.
Our kids are already targets by some and so if they react inappropriately to police the outcome could be ugly (which we have seen over and over but we are too busy blaming and not addressing the root of the problem which is often the attitude whether racism is involved or not)
WE can controlled the ignorance of another but we can control how we deal with it. The decision that we make to deal with it can make the situation worst or better.
That is only part of the my issue, the other is this . . .
We need to stop claiming every incident that involves more that one race a racially motivated incident. Many times it is completely obvious that race can not be identified as the reason a situation goes down but we seem to reach as far as possible to be seen a a victim.
This is not good. it is not good for creating harmony between races and it is not good if people really want to rid the world of racism.
Exaggerating highlight racism exists is not necessary. There will be plenty of true incidents to highlight. I don’t understand why this is so hard to understand.
Btw, Compete's analysis of The Root's traffic in the last 12 months: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/theroot.com/
Great post, Barry, and great to see The Root being strategic in their handling of that rare moment.
How did you get that “more than 1 million unique visitors in June” stat? I've been keeping an eye on their traffic using Compete.com, but haven't been able to cross-reference those numbers with a MediaMetrix or anything more 'official.' Compete had them at 400K UV in May so hitting 1M in June is pretty damn impressive.
If I were a betting man, I'd say that somewhere between MJ's death and their presence on Twitter (@therootbuzz – full disclosure: my homeboy writes it) lies the secret to that month-to-month surge. On Twitter, @therootbuzz has gone from 170 in its first month (March '09) to over 1,400 today – chart it here: http://ow.ly/huEM Has anyone done any work around the impact Twitter has on media brands?
Btw, Compete's analysis of The Root's traffic in the last 12 months: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/theroot.com/
Great post, Barry, and great to see The Root being strategic in their handling of that rare moment.
How did you get that “more than 1 million unique visitors in June” stat? I've been keeping an eye on their traffic using Compete.com, but haven't been able to cross-reference those numbers with a MediaMetrix or anything more 'official.' Compete had them at 400K UV in May so hitting 1M in June is pretty damn impressive.
If I were a betting man, I'd say that somewhere between MJ's death and their presence on Twitter (@therootbuzz – full disclosure: my homeboy writes it) lies the secret to that month-to-month surge. On Twitter, @therootbuzz has gone from 170 in its first month (March '09) to over 1,400 today – chart it here: http://ow.ly/huEM Has anyone done any work around the impact Twitter has on media brands?