In The Punch vs National Times debate, the missing metric is personality
If you’re one of the 12 people who cares about whether Fairfax’s National Times has more traffic than Crikey or News Ltd’s The Punch (and I think I’m one of them) there’s an interesting piece about the opinion sites in the Sydney Morning Herald today.
According to Julian Lee, Fairfax has now persuaded Nielsen to publish what it describes as “comparable traffic figures”.
The debate has emerged because as well as having its own URL, much of the content for the National Times sits within the smh.com.au and theage.com.au mastheads.
Meanwhile. News Ltd’s The Punch exists as a genuinely standalone site.
I am unsure why these people think advertisers care about cheap opinion/free editorial/politician soapbox sites.
Agency: “Want to run your banner ads next to a poorly written misinformed opinion piece about Penny Wong’s choice of pantsuit?”
Client: “Erm, not really unless there’s nothing better out there.”
it’s also important to add that the key metric for an op-ed site surely isn’t topline unique browsers … real success would be measured by regular repeat traffic and monthly time spent.
ub’s can be gamed too easily – what national times is doing is the online equivalent of putting a political opinion piece in the middle of the Womens Weekly and claiming it has a high end AB, politically aware opinion leader audience of 1m people.
I must be one of those 12 too, Tim, ‘cos I’m intrigued enough by web traffic numbers to have made a goose of myself in Crikey yesterday.
One important question here is WTF do we actually mean by “most popular”?
The industry-standard metric seems to be “unique browsers monthly” or “daily”. But if a site has, say, 1000 unique visitors a day who each view on average 5 pages per visit, but another has 2000 visitors who only view 2 pages each, which is “the” most popular?
How does that change if on one site the average time per page is 2 minutes as folks read a complete op-ed piece, but on the other they just glance at the headline and bounce through in 5 seconds?
How does that change if, as I did just then, I didn’t really spend 10 minutes looking at your web page but instead wandered across the kitchen to see how the pasta was going?
All statistics are lies and propaganda anyway. 😉