3 Ever-Green Database Apps for Online Media to Improve the Traffic

Traffic is king for all online media websites. Not only do news websites rely on traffic to generate ad revenue, it is also a critical indicator of the vitality and influence of any media organization. However, as the way people receive information changes and their attention span shortens, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to attract enough traffic to news websites, not to mention any growth in numbers.

Adopted by more than 80% of all leading U.S. news websites, Caspio’s cloud database platform opens up a new frontier for all online media to turn static datasets into interactive web applications that create more engaging content. With the free online database platform’s intuitive point-and-click visual app builder, reporters and editors can easily create applications without writing a single line of code.

Media professionals can easily build all kinds of database apps such as campaign contributions, government salaries, mug shot databases and more. Below we have listed four types of database apps that have helped our media customers generate large and continuous traffic to their websites, some of which are so popular that the news organizations even spun off a separate site from the original stories.

• Public Employee Salary Database: Always an interesting topic for the general public, public employee salary database is a top performer for many of our media customers. Reporters can obtain such data from government agencies and turn it into a searchable database to generate continuous traffic. For example, the salary database published by the San Francisco Chronicle generated over 1 million page views on the first day it was launched and continues to drive traffic to the site throughout the year.

• Restaurant Inspection Reports: Another popular database app for media is searchable database apps with local restaurant inspection data. WIVB News4, the local news leader in Buffalo, New York published a restaurant inspection database for 8 major counties in Western New York,  the app attracted over half a million page views within the first day running the story. The project was received with such interest from local communities that the station has expanded the effort to include inspection data for food trucks and school cafeterias. WIVB has also created a mobile-friendly version with Caspio where readers can search the data using smart phones or tablets.