Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

You always have to take Web traffic statistics with a very large grain of salt. Online traffic measurement is still a bit of a black art, even if you're analyzing your own server logs, and third-party traffic counts are even more flaky. Third-party traffic stats are estimates, at best, based on surveys whose sample size and metholdology are more than a little dodgy. In particular, if somebody quotes Alexa.com traffic statistics to you, run the other way—they're essentially voodoo.

With that caveat, there are some interesting traffic figures floating about today for newspaper Web sites that seem to indicate that—horrors—traffic to most newspaper sites has stopped growing.

According to a report by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, newspaper site readership isn't growing at the rate that's been trumpeted by the industry. In fact, the study—ominously titled "Creative Destruction"—suggests that if you throw out the traffic numbers from NewYorkTimes.com, Washingtonpost.com and USAToday.com, the rest of newspaper Web site traffic, as measured by unique visitors, has been flat over the past year.

Now, just to show you how unreliable Web traffic numbers can be, the increases in USAToday.com's traffic cited by the Shorenstein report—which relies on stats from, uh-oh, Alexa, Nielsen/Net Ratings, Web Stat and Compete.com—seem to be contradicted by another report today, in TechCrunch. That one suggests that USAToday.com's traffic has been dropping steadily over the past few months, in the wake of the site's controversial redesign (which, in fairness, occurred just as the Shorenstein report was winding up). According to TechCrunch, Compete.com's data shows a 29 percent dropoff in USAToday.com's unique visitors since March, with NewYorkTimes.com and WashingtonPost.com flat in that period.

But wait, there's more, and this illustrates the fallacy of Web statistics: TechCrunch also reports that Comscore's stats show USAToday.co's unique visitors falling 14 percent since March—half of what Compete.com shows. So USAToday.com traffic is either up, down, or down a lot over the past few months. Take your pick.

Got a headache yet? There's a spirited discussion in TechCrunch's comments section about the relative values of the Compete.com and Comscore methodologies, which is worth reading for a taste of just how crazy the Web traffic-counting game can be. Truth be told, the only people who really know how USAToday.com and other sites are performing are insiders with access to the actual internal traffic numbers from their servers—and even that can vary depending on which statistics tool is doing the counting. (Update, and get the HeadOn ready to apply directly to your forehead: USAToday.com, apparently coincidentally, put out a press release today saying unique visitors were up 20 percent in July, year-over-year—though, adding to the confusion, this official unique visitor number, 10.6 million, was similar to what Compete.com said uniques had fallen to in previous months from a pre-redesign mark of 14 million.)

In any case, with a nod toward the Shorenstein study, which at least tried to look at several counting methods, however flawed, and apply some methodology to them, let's assume the basic contention is true: that aside from the mega-sites, newspaper Web site traffic seems to have plateaued.

Is anyone really surprised? Most newspaper Web sites are pretty uninspired creations: hard to navigate, home pages crammed with content, not updated as often as they should be, lacking truly unique content and bereft of the Web technologies that are driving traffic these days: video, social networking, etc. There are some pretty ugly—or worse, bland and uninteresting—newspaper Web sites out there, including some of the biggest names in the business.

Indeed, most newspaper sites still seem trapped in the 1990s, when "pasting the newspaper on a screen" was the best idea anybody had. Meanwhile, blogs, wikis, search engines, YouTube, Flicker, Facebook, iTunes and others—all with huge audiences, by the way—are redefining content presentation on the Web, leaving newspaper sites stuck in the past, much like their print counterparts. Web readers visiting those cutting-edge sites reasonably expect similar sophistication from newspaper sites, and too often, they don't get it.

Moreover, too many newspaper sites still insist on presenting lots of national and international news that's available all over the Web—nobody's coming to DailyBugle.com to read that stuff. This is yet another reason why newspapers need to significantly increase their focus on local coverage and understand that that local is a competitive advantage that readers, online and off, can't get anywhere else.

In the end, uninspired Web sites face the same fate as uninspired print products: irrelevancy and disappearing readership and advertising. If newspaper Web sites are to be the future of the industry, they need to get truly serious about their local focus and step up and take advantage of the latest technologies to deliver what readers expect from a Web site in 2007. That's how they'll grow traffic. If they don't...oy, I don't even want to think about it. But the Shorenstein people have:

The Web particularly threatens daily newspapers. They were among the first to post news on the Internet but their initial advantage has all but disappeared in the face of increased competition from electronic media and non-traditional providers. ... The Internet is redistributing the news audience in ways that is threatening some traditional news organizations. Local newspapers have been the outlets that are most at risk, and they are likely to remain so. If our trend analysis is borne out, many newspapers are going to have difficulty even holding onto their online readers.

2 Comments

I agree that local and regional newspaper sites should just stop running the national/international stuff and de-clutter their pages.

I'm tired of seeing 500 copies of the same damn AP or Reuters story in Google news. And to make matters worse you'll get shorter or longer versions depending on how much space they had in print. Then there's the "value add" of stripping links, pictures and other items that might have made the original story interesting.

I want the original, definitive story.

Posted by: Rocky | August 16, 2007 at 04:09 PM