The Modern Journalist

Newspapers Attract More Page Views, Retain Less Attention. Someone Should Tell Them…

I’m always tickled when people roll out metrics online as a measure of how well a site is doing. At the end of the day, there’s really only one metric that matters: revenues.

There are levers that you can adjust: inventory rates and pricing (although if you ask most site producers for a detailed list of their pricing for the website, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts most don’t have a rate card) are big ones; actual CPM vs CPM; percentage of inventory sold.

Those are the measures of a solid site, not to mention to ancillary real products produced by the site, whether it be subscriptions or hard-copy versions of a repackaged product.

So I got a kick out of reading the latest metrics from the Newspapers Association of America, which rolled out its first quarter statistics for Web properties across the industry. While we don’t see any of the above-mentioned revenue projects for the industry, we did see a lot of smoke and mirrors. So let’s play Smoke and Mirror.

Smoke: The first claim is that newspaper websites attracted nearly 41 percent of all website users (presumably in the United States and not ALL Internet users, as the press release states)
Mirror: The fact that so many people visited the site is actually meaningless because the value of a reader doesn’t come with one view. So if the aggregation services that exist now are popular, it could be that Digg, Fark and others are sending one-time traffic bursts to newspaper websites. Which is bad for advertising.

Smoke: The second claim is that websites generated 3.1 billion page views per month for the quarter, a slight increase from the previous year.
Mirror: The industry claims a 12.3 percent increase in traffic, but a much lower page view rate (these are in back to back paragraphs), which backs up the first Mirror, that people are stopping by for one article and then leaving. They aren’t sticking around the site.

Smoke: Newspaper websites visitors are 59 percent more likely to have shopped online for a automobile
Mirror: I can’t even begin to get into the demographic information for this as they haven’t compared it to any other sites (it’s just newspaper site visitors are twice as likely as WHAT, WHAT, WHAT…they never tell us.) The automotive crap, though, is entirely self-manufactured as newspaper conglomerates have partnered with or bought up car buying services suck as Cars.com. So, is it that people are going to newspaper sites to buy cars — or they are finding services online through the newspaper.

My argument. It’s the latter. Which has always been my point. Newspapers aren’t good for telling stories and selling ads (we know this because of the traffic patterns play out that people are spending less time on the site and looking at fewer pages). They are very good at providing services. If they’d just get into the data service business.

Alan Mutter, who I really need to add to my blog roll, has a good analysis of the industry’s ridiculous take on its numbers.