USAToday Says Traffic Way Up
Michael Arrington
19 comments »
Less than twelve hours after I posted that USAToday’s traffic appears to be going the wrong way, they issue a press release saying traffic is way up.
USATODAY.com, recorded a 20% year-over year increase in traffic for the month of July 2007 and a month-over-month growth of 24% according to Nielsen/NetRatings. It was also reported that more than 10.6 million unique visitors came to USATODAY.com in the month of July.
Much of the increase was attributed to the Simpson’s Movie (the site held a contest around it) and an exclusive interview with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.
This was issued way too fast to have been a response to my post, so the timing is coincidental. I also received an email from Pluck CEO Dave Panos, who says that their social networking tools are doing very well on USAToday’s site. He says “The results that USA Today has received from our social media tools has been absolutely phenomenal and usage continues to skyrocket each and every month. I wish I was a liberty to give you the specific metrics — but they are staggering.”
Well, if the results are indeed “staggering,” (in a good way) the Comscore data must be pointing the wrong way. That’s good news for USAToday, and even better news for Pluck.
But the situation isn’t certain. The Comscore data I posted only went through June. The data released today is for July. A 24% traffic increase from June to July is too much of a jump, too. As they said in the press release, the Simpson’s contest and the Rowling interview probably helped drive most or all of the gains.
What would be ideal is if USAToday or Pluck published a case study on the results of the social network experiment to date.
Typo in the first paragraph: “going to wrong way” should be “going the wrong way” (I think)
thanks Neil.
ahh, actually….wait, forget it.
I know, “Traditional media doesn’t get it.”
Go team!
Michael -
USAToday has quoted Nielsen/NetRatings numbers, not actuals. Who is to say Nielsen is right, and either comscore or compete aren’t?
Don’t you agree?
Goo - I have no idea. Best we can do is look at all the data points, start pointing fingers and see what happens.
I “love” it when companies quote the service that makes them look the best — sometimes nielsen, other times compete.
if you do a press release, use actual data for your own site — not 3rd party estimates — unless you’re trying to make some wider market share point.
spin spin spin
I posted on my blog a month or two ago that USAToday.com traffic was tanking, according to compete.com. I know there are Gannett executives who read my blog … so they were already aware that people were watching their traffic. That’s certainly a spin they would want to debunk before too many more a-list blogs pick it up.
USA Today quotes Nielsen because that’s the gold standard and the third party service that advertisers make their buying decisions off of.
If they quoted their own stats, everybody would say you can’t trust internally generated numbers.
Gannett now has press releases out citing record traffic in March and record traffic in July. Social media tools were in place the entire time — kind of hard to point fingers at social media being responsible for any dips.
This statement makes sense in the context of explaining what went wrong in the reporting of a story; I wouldn’t think it would be something you strive for in future coverage. >
Anyone who uses Nielsen Netratings to make big advertising buy decisions needs help. Bad.
Many of these companies need to issue releases of case studies for I believe mind-maps illustrating these various business models would do well for many webmasters and internet gurus in the world. As for contests and entertainment content, these types of content areas always work for driving data. Has anyonel ooked at the Diggs of those pages? They are rather high for a news site. Exclusive content is also perfect, but only if the information is actually interesting to the reader.
Great job USA Today, but it won’t increase every month by 20%, that is far too much for any site, unless the site is the NYTimes…On a good note, this means that more people are moving online for the consumption of their news.
I work for a large publisher and we scrapped Comscore in favor of NNR about 6 months ago. Comscore numbers have been very inconsistent. Nielsen’s numbers track much closer to our internal metrics. And I’ve heard other metrics people say the same thing. In short, I take Comscore with a grain of salt, and Alexa/Compete with a pound of it.
Traffic can be bought. How many returning visitors and how long were the session times? That’s what really matters… though I think it’s naive to expect all sites online to have massive traffic. It has never worked that way in media/television/etc. It won’t likely with the internet either. It’ll probably be a good year before people figure this out.
Looks like a drop, then a pickup.
http://www.quantcast.com/usatoday.com
“This was issued way too fast to have been a response to my post, so the timing is coincidental.”
You think?
You guys are important but I get the sense that a reality check might be due.
I put very little value into any word from Pluck about business operations after the way they’ve left thousands of users hanging due to their abortion of “Shadows” and not providing any tools to migrate to other platforms. I would never use another Pluck social media tool again despite having really liked Shadows until they disenfranchised their user base.
I give usatoday credit for cleaning up their interface/design. Very clean and usable whereas other sites tend to be going in the other (wrong) direction (see: azcentral.com).