When people outside of FTVLive ask me about the website, I most often reply with, “It’s a website about TV news, geared to people in TV news, and if you’re not in news, you wouldn’t really care about it.”

That’s how I feel, but I have learned over the years from emails and contact with FTVLive readers, there are many more viewers (who don’t work in TV news) that read FTVLive. I’m not sure why, but they say they enjoy it.

That being said, I still consider FTVLive a niche website. On average, FTVLive gets between 50,000 and 70,000 visits each day. Of course, there are days when FTVLive blows up, but this is an average.

Not exactly the Drudge Report, but enough traffic that media ad companies constantly contact us to try and place ads on FTVLive.com. We have continued to turn them all down.

With all that being said, I was pointed to a story by Vital Vegas, which talked about the viewership of local TV news in Sin City.

I wanted to share those numbers.

KSNV TV 3 (NBC)
5 a.m. – 5,600
6 a.m. – 10,200
12 noon – 12,600
5 p.m. – 23,900
6 p.m. – 13,900
6:30 p.m. – 9,700
7 p.m. – 8,400
11 p.m. – 10,400

KVVU TV 5 (FOX)
5 a.m. – 9,900
6 a.m. – 16,800
7 a.m. – 23,500
8 a.m. – 23,400
9 a.m. – 21,900
10 a.m. – 10,000
11 a.m. – 8,000
3 p.m. – 11,700
2 p.m. – 9,500
1 p.m. – 7,900
4 p.m. – 12,500
5 p.m. – 14,800
5:30 p.m. – 14,800
6 p.m. – 8,500
6:30 p.m. – 8,800
7 p.m. – 6,700
10 p.m. – 16,700
11 p.m. – 7,400

KLAS TV 8 (CBS)
5 a.m. – 4,500
6 a.m. – 7,600
12 noon – 8,700
3 p.m. – 5,000
4 p.m. – 6,500
5 p.m. – 14,500
6 p.m. – 14,000
6:30 p.m. – 14,200
11 p.m. – 9,200

KTNV TV 13 (ABC)
5 a.m. – 3,100
6 a.m. – 5,800
9 a.m. – 3,900
11 a.m. – 13,900
3 p.m. – 4,800
5 p.m. – 22,400
6 p.m. – 7,700
6:30 p.m. – 22,400
7:30 p.m. – 20,700
11 p.m. – 9,800

The most-watched newscast in Las Vegas doesn’t even get 24,000 viewers.

The 6 PM newscast on Gray’s KVVU gets just 8,500 viewers. The Las Vegas DMA is more than 2 million, and just 8,500 of them are watching the 6:00 news….that’s crazy to me.

I did a tour of my house here in Florida, and it got the same number of viewers.

My advice to you guys is to go to digital media. Start a YouTube channel or something along those lines.

I knew that TV news was dying (although I still believe that if done right, that doesn’t have to be the case), but I didn’t realize how much viewership fell off in the midsize markets.