The Newspaper Association of America produced a new report on latest numbers on traffic at newspaper sites. It mixes the good -- one in three supposedly go to these sites -- with the bad -- traffic appears to be slowing or declining. But this is based all on Nielsen Online numbers, and when I was editor at E&P -- which was owned by The Nielsen Co. before heading out to sea-- I always insisted on generous take-with-grain-of-salt warnings with our monthly reports on these numbers. Other number crunchers vary, and also are not necessarily correct, but it's impossible to get a firm grip on all this. The Nielsen numbers are further hard to judge since they've lately increased the size of their panels (after much criticism) so comparisons to last year's numbers are shaky. UPDATE: Commenter to this post hits E&P's take on NAA report. -- Greg Mitchell
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Web Counting: The Good, The Bad and the Huh?
The Newspaper Association of America produced a new report on latest numbers on traffic at newspaper sites. It mixes the good -- one in three supposedly go to these sites -- with the bad -- traffic appears to be slowing or declining. But this is based all on Nielsen Online numbers, and when I was editor at E&P -- which was owned by The Nielsen Co. before heading out to sea-- I always insisted on generous take-with-grain-of-salt warnings with our monthly reports on these numbers. Other number crunchers vary, and also are not necessarily correct, but it's impossible to get a firm grip on all this. The Nielsen numbers are further hard to judge since they've lately increased the size of their panels (after much criticism) so comparisons to last year's numbers are shaky. UPDATE: Commenter to this post hits E&P's take on NAA report. -- Greg Mitchell
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The E&P story on this report is misleading. The headline says "Newspaper Web Traffic Slipped in Q4" and the lead is similar. It bases its conclusion on the fact that uniques declined sequentially from October to November to December. Of course it did. In non-election years, November is slower than October because of Thanksgiving week, and December slower yet because of Christmas break. The four best months of the year for traffic (barring huge news) are January, March, September and October. Any attempt to talk about month-over-month changes that fails to take seasonal patterns into account is invalid.
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