Tacos, elk sheds, and Facebook ads: How some local news sites saw their traffic spike

Big gainers included L.A. Taco, The TRiiBE, and Buckrail. Here’s our quarterly ranking of the top 25 local for-profit news sites in the United States. It’s time for our latest look at which newsrooms are having success increasing their web traffic. We bring you four of these each quarter, looking at four different market segments: local newspapers, nonprofit news outlets, public media stations, and for-profit local news sites. Today’s edition looks at local for-profit news sites. (Eligible sites for this ranking are for-profit members of the trade group LION Publishers — LION standing for Local, Independent, Online News — so these are mostly digital-born newsrooms, not newspapers or TV stations.) The rankings for Q2 feature many of the same sites we told you about last time, like TAPinto, Oil City News, Muddy River News, and Lost Coast Outpost. This time, we’ve got details from local news sites in California, Illinois, Wyoming, and British Columbia. Below that are the Top 25 rankings for April, May, and June. L.A. Taco At L.A. Taco — which promises “street-level news stories that often cover L.A.’s most marginalized communities” — boomed 51% in May, and part of the explanation is right in the site’s name.
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