Comments on: In The Punch vs National Times debate, the missing metric is personality

By: Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:49:39 +0000

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.

By: Larry

Larry — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:47:50 +0000

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.

By: Larry

Larry — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:32:32 +0000

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.”