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December 10, 2007

NYTimes Surges, CNet Slumps

Erick Schonfeld

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Ever since the NYTimes.com swept away the last remaining boulders of its subscription pay wall (aka Times Select) in mid-September, its traffic has been going through the roof. According to comScore, it gained 7.5 million readers worldwide from the end of August through the end of October (November numbers are not out yet). That is a 64 percent jump (to a total of 19.4 million). Similarly worldwide monthly pageviews surged 52 percent in that time period to 181 million. Other major news outlets like BusinessWeek.com (4.4 million readers in October), the WSJ.com (3.6 million, with a subscriber wall), and Wired.com (3.2 million) saw gains as well during the Fall, but nothing as dramatic as the NYTimes.com.

comscore-chart-nyt-cnet.png

To put this in perspective, in the month of October alone, the New York Times added 4.9 million readers on the Web. That is more than double the total readership of CNet’s News.com of 2 million, which sadly seems to be one of the few media sites declining in visitors (from 2.5 million in August). News.com’s pageviews have also been flat, at 6 million per month since August. For comparison’s sake, comScore shows TechCrunch (including our sister site CrunchGear) at 8 million monthly pageviews worldwide in October (we surpassed News.com in September), and it shows us catching up in online readers with 1.7 million worldwide in October. Here are the actual worldwide figures from comScore for a variety of news sites:

comscore-table-nyt-cnet.png

And just for fun, here is a chart showing pageviews over the past year for Wired.com, News.com, Economist.com, TechCrunch (with CrunchGear), and ZDNet Blogs. TechCrunch is the green line.

comscore-tc-news-wired-chart.png

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 8:35 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. 113.com

    December 10th, 2007 at 8:41 am

    What does Cnet do? Heard of it quite often!

  2. 113.com

    December 10th, 2007 at 8:42 am

    and, only 8M pageview for TC??!

  3. Kevin

    December 10th, 2007 at 8:44 am

    When i scroll by a story in google reader and mark it as read without actually reading it does that count as a page viewer for wired?

  4. Michael Arrington

    December 10th, 2007 at 8:49 am

    Kevin - no. RSS, unless you click through to the site, does not create page views or a unique visit.

  5. Allen Stern

    December 10th, 2007 at 8:57 am

    Erick - I don’t believe this is a fair comparison. It’s like two dudes boxing and one has an arm behind his back :)

  6. Shafqat

    December 10th, 2007 at 8:59 am

    There was a major NYT site redesign a few months ago, and I think the overhaul may have contributed (perhaps a small amount) to this traffic increase. I know a lot of the feedback was very positive…

  7. Chris R

    December 10th, 2007 at 9:00 am

    Quality vs. Quantity.

  8. Mike W

    December 10th, 2007 at 9:13 am

    IMHO- CNET has been going down the tube for about 2 years now.

    The writing is laced biased opinion and I often find typos and grammatical mistakes in their articles. Not great work for a “news” organization.

    In terms of tech news, you can usually get it from other sites like Engadget, Digg etc…. about 24 hours before CNET will even run it.

    It’s certainly not the site it used to be.

  9. somastud

    December 10th, 2007 at 9:14 am

    The revolution has never been led by CNET. It’s a company of slick hipster egos and precious little substance. The company today is worth little more than they were worth in 1998:

    http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?.....q=l&c=

    They deserve their reputation for destroying everything they touch. But damn, they wear cool glasses.

  10. 113.com

    December 10th, 2007 at 9:38 am

    > CNET Networks Announces Open Content Platform
    > http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/071210/20071210005401.html

    Hmm, they’re even launching an open platform today.. looks like it’s an interesting enterprise!!

  11. faceloop

    December 10th, 2007 at 9:42 am

    Eric, Mike…

    How do the comscore numbers look in comparison to your internal numbers? Without giving too much away, how accurate is comscore vs. alexa vs. compete?

    Are they all crap? Is there a clear winner? Please advise.

  12. Doug Mehus

    December 10th, 2007 at 9:48 am

    CNET Networks to buy TechCrunch for $50 million in cash, perhaps?

    Really, it does make the most logical sense. Hopefully Michael Arrington is interested in staying on as co-editor post-buyout. It’d be the best of both worlds - he gets to stay blogging on the hottest tech news Web property and gets to cash out.

    Cheers,
    Doug

  13. chrisco

    December 10th, 2007 at 9:56 am

    Stock could be a buy too, although I usually stay away from the declining newspaper industry. But the New York Times is a special case. Besides it being my favorite print newspaper and a killer brand — unless you’re from a “red” state — it seems to be reinventing itself quite nicely. They are the best and brightest and them seem to be getting on the clue train. Good work.

  14. Jeff the Great

    December 10th, 2007 at 10:21 am

    will be interesting to see what happens to WSJ.com once the subscription model is dropped as Murdoch promised.

  15. Emma

    December 10th, 2007 at 10:40 am

    Sorry but these numbers have no credibility. CNET, as these numbers go, has 2 million unique readers and an average page view of 3 per reader? Considering the range of stuff on CNET I think, just out curiosity, they would generate more page views per reader than that.

    Nothing like the interweb for an overwhelming ability to lie its ass off!

  16. Bjorn

    December 10th, 2007 at 10:42 am

    Are you planning on buying news.com someday? I think you should. It needs a remake. :/

  17. Aidan Henry

    December 10th, 2007 at 10:48 am

    From a positioning perspective, CNet is still a web 1.0 company in my mind. The company is still in transition and has yet to really prove itself as a new-age media outlet…

    Cheers,
    Aidan
    http://www.MappingTheWeb.com

  18. All About Content

    December 10th, 2007 at 11:13 am

    The dismantling of the subscription service aside, hats off to the New York Times for being so progressive in their approach to technology and how to best utilize it for the benefit of their readers. Allowing readers to create customizable homepages and the recent introduction of Blogrunner are good reasons why their online readership is on such a steep trajectory. Unlike the music industry, which has been so lax in its adoption of new ways to deliver what their market wants, the publishing industry- or at least some prominent elements within it - recognize the challenge to adapt or die. The NY Times is clearly benefiting from its foresight.

  19. Future prediction

    December 10th, 2007 at 11:20 am

    Yeap, my prediction is almost come true. Words appear. NYT, Businessweek, etc..

    In the future, I can see photographers from NYT, WSJ, Businessweek, LA times photosnap shot Mike’s future nosebleed. Full of flashes. I don’t know who punch mike in nose. It could be Google or Facebook employee.

    I think Techcrunch should attack Google and Facebook from preventing future fistfight. I also think Techcrunch 50 should ban Google and Facebook employees for showcase.

  20. Mitts Kane

    December 10th, 2007 at 11:24 am

    This is great. I have read the NYT as long as I can remember, and it has nicely evolved to stay current and interesting while retaining its status as one of the best and most serious newspapers. When other news sources like Yahoo News and USA Today allow readers to comment, they become cesspools of perhaps the lowest level of discourse available on the internet. The NYT, on the other hand, increasingly allows comments but lightly moderates them to ensure they are of high quality. Their blogs (including their tech blog at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/) are another example of the way they take some of best principles of web 2.0 without jumping on anything too faddish.

  21. RS

    December 10th, 2007 at 12:00 pm

    I’m reminded of this BTL blog entry awhile back.

    http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6496

    I wasn’t there when the data was pulled and I’m not going to bother with pulling the data myself (remember pulling it from Compete and Quantcast at the time and Cnet was . But I imagine this is most definitely not an aggregate view of the sum total of Cnet properties. And what’s more this is from only one source, Comscore. When you start factoring in the whole family of properties Cnet has (Cnet.com, Gamespot, ZDnet, Download.com, etc) the total volume is not even remotely close. News.com is the only place where Techcrunch’s volume is comparable. Which makes sense. But Cnet does a lot more than just that.

    When looking at site analytics these days it’s also imperative to take an average across multiple tools. When we’re looking at sites we compare across multiple tools these days - Hitwise (not cheap) Compete, Quantcast, Alexa. We looked at (and actually dropped) Comscore awhile back. What has to be disconcerting for the big boys of analytics is that the free/low-cost services are getting just as good on the larger sites these days for quick-take everyday analysis. And even when you dig deeper, Compete’s dirt cheap keyword data is actually just as good as the FAR more expensive Hitwise’s these days.

  22. Steve Ballmer

    December 10th, 2007 at 12:14 pm

    The NYT partnership with Microsoft is really yeilding fruit! The rest of you people should follow suit!

    virb.com/balm/

  23. Tim

    December 10th, 2007 at 12:16 pm

    What about international sites such as BBC, FT, Le Monde, Figaro etc? How do they stack up? What about CNN? Surely BBC is the largest on a worldwide scale?!?

  24. Joe

    December 10th, 2007 at 12:36 pm

    The numbers/graphs say CNET News.com, so I would think it is only measuring their subsite focused on news and not the rest of the network that houses their reviews/video/podcast/download/blogs etc., which seems to be their current focus.

  25. Dorothy

    December 10th, 2007 at 12:53 pm

    Considering NYT and CNET run each others’ news on their sites, they clearly didn’t consider each other competitors when the NYT subscription model was still in place. But maybe it’s time for CNET to consider ending that partnership, if it means now that it is losing its readers to the fnow ree NYT.

  26. Preston

    December 10th, 2007 at 1:02 pm

    It’s the free market effect of getting rid of the subscriber wall. The real story is: did advertising gains make up for the loss in subscriber fees?

  27. CAR

    December 10th, 2007 at 1:03 pm

    once wsj.com does it, all other placed will be watching to see if they should use that model or not, i think economist should do thesame.

  28. P. Wineberg

    December 10th, 2007 at 1:29 pm

    You’ve got to be kidding, right? Hey Mike, why don’t you just zip your fly, pull out your thang and say “CNET sux” because that’s the basic thrust of that “story.” C’mon, you can do better.

  29. Sam

    December 10th, 2007 at 1:41 pm

    Yahoo! News stayed steady to rising at around 35M uniques. Not sure why it was left out of this analysis since its the #1 news site.

  30. Rollo

    December 10th, 2007 at 1:42 pm

    @27: Economist already does. They brought down their wall just after I paid my hefty annual online subscription (which they seem to be still selling, strangely!).

  31. Michael Arrington

    December 10th, 2007 at 1:55 pm

    P. Windeberg - I didn’t write the story, but in general, yeah, CNET is in trouble. They have excellent writers, people I’d love to work with and learn from. But the organization needs to be ripped apart by a hedge fund and sold off in pieces.

  32. Darian

    December 10th, 2007 at 2:23 pm

    Also wondering if CNET selling off certain Web properties affects these numbers. If the Comscore number is a “roll-up” of all CNET web properties then you might see a “false-negative” of traffic/PVs going down related to the fact that certain URLs are no longer counted as part of the CNET property.

  33. PJ Brunet

    December 10th, 2007 at 2:32 pm

    In perspective now, if you want to be #2 to take BusinessGeek down to #3 you need to hire more writers, that didn’t just discover the Internet, like last year.

  34. Fake Micheal Arrington

    December 10th, 2007 at 5:02 pm

    I personally dont see any value in CNET acquiring techcrunch. People are we forgetting something here. Techcrunch is just a blog.. plain and simple. I have never clicked on any of the advert at the top of the page. So where is the real value, certainly not in these commentators that most times act like high school girls bickering back and forth.

    if someone can help me understand what is the value of techcrunch to CNET? none, thats my preliminary answer.

  35. James

    December 10th, 2007 at 6:26 pm

    @33 Correct. And they need to ditch Duncan Riley. Why not hire a serious writer living in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore or China? That would be useful and give us a wider perspective. TechCrunch page views might be holding steady for now but as the quality of the articles drops and the TechCrunch brand is sullied, traffic will move to the (now free) quality sites.

  36. hyokon

    December 10th, 2007 at 6:37 pm

    To Fake Machael Arrington,

    As someone outside US, I read Techcrunch everyday but not other incumbent media. What is the true meaning of “media” or “journalism”? Aside from the ‘image’ of a media company (reporters screaming at phones, etc) they do two things, delivering news and/or expressing perspectives. In that sense, Techcrunch (and many other blogs) is not at all different from incumbent media.

    For some situations or tastes (marketers may call it segments…), blogs like TC are even better. Why I like TC? I like Mike’s perspectives. The incumbents are too big to have a strong character. Their articles are different depending on who the writer is.

    In that sense, TC has a choice as well. You can remain a small boutique, or grow to be another characterless media company hiring many writers with different perspectives. Personally, I hope you to remain small (so that I can keep enjoying Mike’s perspective), but then you would make smaller money and it will be harder to exit. ‘You’ cannot exit if the company is you. It is a hard choice - not just economic where you can decide by NPV, but something philosophical. What, not how much, do you want TC to be?

  37. Mitts Kane

    December 10th, 2007 at 8:02 pm

    “why not hire a serious writer living in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore or China?”

    This is a great idea. I would love to hear more about what is going on in the rest of the world, specifically Asia.

  38. jason

    December 10th, 2007 at 8:49 pm

    Mitts Kane, read Tech Crunch Japan.

    Anyways, this isn’t too fair of a judgment. Wired is for dumb fucks. I mean, that magazine couldn’t even pull off a decent conference in L.A, I was so embarrassed for their magazine. also, don’t dog Cnet too bad, because it’s not the original owners still. Kevin Wendle did a great job starting it and has no control over how they have screwed it up now. Just as tech crunch will sell one day, it will also turn into a piece of shit.

  39. James

    December 10th, 2007 at 9:31 pm

    @38 jason: I try to read Tech Crunch Japan but my Japanese just isn’t good enough. I would like to have articles in English. Plus, most of TechCrunch Japan is Japanese translations of the stories here.

    @36 hyokon wrote “blogs like TC are even better. Why I like TC? I like Mike’s perspectives. The incumbents are too big to have a strong character. Their articles are different depending on who the writer is.”

    What on earth are you talking about? All writers at a magazine like The Economist write in exactly the same character and style and stay on message. There is more diversity of character and quality at TC (and it’s not exactly a good thing… ie. Duncan.)

  40. Erick Schonfeld

    December 10th, 2007 at 10:02 pm

    @21, that is correct. The numbers in the post are just for CNet’s News.com property,the most direct competitor to the other sites listed (including TC).

  41. Ree Tanjuatco

    December 10th, 2007 at 10:12 pm

    Are you seriously comparing TC to these reputable news organizations? LMAO

  42. Fake Micheal Arrington

    December 10th, 2007 at 10:30 pm

    Ree, i agree with you. Its a joke to me. TC is nothing more than a glorified forum nothing more. I read and comment here because thats what people do on forum and chat rooms.

    Just like everyone else they have their biases, but that doesn’t bother me at all, since i don’t really take any serious on here anyway.

  43. Blog.kmto.de

    December 10th, 2007 at 11:48 pm

    I’m not sure if this really means success for the NYT. I mean whenever you give something valuable for free people come. Price still is a signal for quality and will be. That would or could have make the NYT outstanding and differentiate from the “crowd”. You dont always have to fight to rule the whole world.

  44. mig

    December 11th, 2007 at 1:38 am

    TC, I like reading you but I take all of what you say at face value. This is a blog not a journalistic organization. Some people here seem confused as to the difference. I am not going to waste my time to explain it here. Go wikipedia-it and learn for yourself why it is that BLOGS seem to be one step ahead on product reviews than CNET for example. Ever heard of NDA’s? Well Blogs don’t have to abide by certain “journalistic standards”. This string of comments has a tinge of right winged flava’ to it. I feel sick now. Michael Arrington, you sound like a hater bro.

  45. pheonix

    December 11th, 2007 at 2:02 am

    Right, so let me get this straight, the TechCrunch figures include CrunchGear, but the cnet news.com numbers don’t include the traffic from cnet.com.

    Wow, that’s some amazing reporting, and a stunningly well researched piece of spin.

    I don’t think anyone would claim news.com was perfect, or that cnet.com wasn’t in some challenging times at the moment. But the CNET properties do offer some diverse content, including cnettv.com, ZDNET.com, TV.com, GameSpot and worldwide editions of cnet.com.

  46. hyokon

    December 11th, 2007 at 3:46 am

    @39 James: I don’t read Enonomist regularly, but I believe you. But can you say that big media companies do better in maintaining the same style than niche blogs?

    @44 mig: I don’t disagree with you in the definition of a journalistic media. My only point is that “if we define media as an entity that delivers news/facts and perspectives”, TC is a media (and one of my favorites). And many other less known blogs are, too. Tagging is popular is because people can put different definition for the same thing. I often tag professional blogs ‘media’, in addition to blog, web2.0, etc. Should I not?

  47. jason

    December 11th, 2007 at 2:06 pm

    Anyone see a correlation between NYT’s traffic jumping in the July/August span and the iPhone being release at the same time? Every iPhone advertisement shows it browsing the NYT website, and I’m sure that has driven traffic as well as NYT’s “coolness” factor simply by being associated with Apple.

  48. Al

    December 11th, 2007 at 9:10 pm

    I agree that CNET seems old. It’s useful, but “old”.

    Concerning the NYT, I only seem to hear about friends who have canned their subscriptions. I canned all newspapers about two years ago as I can see a variety of opinions on the web - not just a single viewpoint as you get with the NYT.

  49. unhip

    December 14th, 2007 at 8:48 am

    The revolution has never been led by Wired. It’s a company of slick hipster egos and precious little substance.

    @9 somastud, you never got over the Hotwired fiasco, did you?

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