By now you’ve heard of, if not visited YouTube.com, the video content site that makes it possible for that footage of your roommate from college trying to skateboard while drinking to be seen by millions of people. We wrote about it back in February, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, you should.

As popular as the site has become, it’s not the only game in town when it comes to finding unique videos. We’ve been noticing a trend lately where local news websites see huge spikes in traffic when certain news clips are picked up by more popular sites or linked virally. For example, Seattle’s KomoTV.com, the site for the local ABC affiliate, typically sees around 300,000 visitors in a month. But in June, thanks in part to a video of a meteor lighting up the skies, over 3 Million people went to the site.

Another local news site that routinely makes it into our Top Movers lists is Orlando’s WFTV. In Week 26 the site more than doubled the number of visitors from the previous week. Why the increase? The DrudgeReport picked up a link to a surveillance video of a man attacking a clerk at an Orlando-area adult toy store. The description of the link promises violence and hints at sex, which is just the right combination to exploit the public’s voyeuristic side while still passing as news. What better way to get eyeballs to your site?

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