Sunday, March 15, 2009

Document: As traffic eases, data spotlight big sites

Illustrating its heft in Gannett's digital footprint, USA Today recorded 2.6 billion page views -- 23% of GCI's total -- during the past 12 months, a new company document shows. Last month alone, the document says, page views across all Gannett sites fell 9.8% compared to February 2008. But that swoon would have been worse without USAT, because its page views rose 2.8% from a year before.

Crunching the document's data today, I identified Gannett's top 25 websites, based on page views over the past 12 months, among newspapers or TV stations. The Phoenix figure combines data for The Arizona Republic and KPNX-TV, readers say in fresh comments, below. It's interesting to note that four of the 25 are pure-broadcast sites, led by Denver's KUSA-TV:

(Click on screenshot for bigger, more readable view)

I obtained the document from a reader who asked to remain anonymous. In January, the document shows, companywide page views fell 6.6% from January 2008. Unfortunately, the document includes prior-year data only for the first two months of this year.

Please post your replies in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write gannettblog[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the green sidebar, upper right.

20 comments:

  1. let's not forget, Phoenix is a paper AND TV station

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  2. Phoenix numbers are generated by both the Arizona Republic and KPNX-TV (Channel 12) (both owned by Gannett).

    How do these numbers compare to a year ago? The Republic and KPNX have worked hard to improve and expand web content.

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  3. Much of the decline in traffic can be attributed to the collapse of the classified verticals -- real estate, automotive and employment. There are far fewer houses and cars for sale (and people buying) and way fewer jobs available. When fewer people are looking and each search yields fewer matches, page views plummet in the verticals. USAT's not as reliant on those verticals as the local sites.

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  4. Denver is KUSA, NOT WUSA. WUSA is in DC.

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  5. Minor point here: The numbers are bad regardless, but 2008 was a leap year, which means traffic this year should have dropped 3.5 percent Y-o-Y right off the top.

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  6. This post graphically shows how free Web software powers "citizen journalists" like me.

    I am writing this comment on my iPhone, from a Wi-Fi cafe in San Francisco. Google's free Blogger software is my publishing platform. A reader e-mailed an Excel spreadsheet with this traffic data to my free Google Gmail account.

    Next, I imported the file's spreadsheets into Google's free Web-based Documents spreadsheet program. Then I crunched the data a time or two, and -- wham! -- done. Finally, I grabbed a screenshot of the completed spreadsheet, then used my $79 PhotoShop software to turn it into a graphic.

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  7. very cool Jim.

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  8. In that case, Jim, I want my $40 back!

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  9. Many of us at USAT are very proud of our Web site and what we have been able to accomplish.

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  10. Can you post the J/F 08 vs. J/F 09 data, site-by-site? I'd love to see how we're doing, even just from that small sliver. Data is very hard to come by. Some people get a daily digest of the most-clicked-on stories and photos, but there's no real comparative information shared with us peons.

    And thanks for starting moderation again. It's a bit of a pain, but worth it.

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  11. Jim, how about providing the numbers for the rest of Gannettland??

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  12. The 'Ville coming in at #9 with 202 million, wow, great job. Wait, scratch that - Indy had 489 million. Let the chronic Indy-Envy continue. There is no cure.

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  13. Phoenix, serving a single market, generates over 1/3 as much traffic as USAToday does. It shows you what a powerful and desirable site it is. A lot of that has to do with the fact that Phoenix is given more latitude as to what their site looks like and to how best to serve their market. If this is not an argument for more local control of web sites I don't know what it. It's a shame corporate refuses to leverage the great work done in Phoenix across the rest of the company. The problem is unless someone in Washington thinks of it first the idea is DOA.

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  14. 4:51 p.m.; let me see what I can figure out. For security reasons, I can't allow access to my Google Documents. Perhaps other readers have another solution?

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  15. That's a tough one considering what you're trying to do. My first impression was to convert it to a PDF and provide a link to it, but I take it you can only do inline's? In that case, couple of jpgs is probably your only good (easy) option.

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  16. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/USATODAYcom-Reports-27-prnews-14648497.html

    I'm wondering if the increase could have anything to do with how USAT is now presented on the community papers' sites.

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  17. Jim, can you show us the percent increase/decrease for the individual papers?

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  18. KUSA has always been ahead of the rest of Gannett. We're in the 18th DMA in the US, and yet we rank #5 in web views?

    And I do know are numbers are way down, ever since corporate forced their webpage format on us.

    We know what the hell we're doing with this "interwebs thing, only to have corporate nincompoops come in and screw it up...

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  19. We know what the hell we're doing with this "interwebs thing, only to have corporate nincompoops come in and screw it up..."

    Tell me about it. EVERY online initiative I was mandated to do had either bugs, glitches or problems that prevented them from being drop-in solutions. A lot of times I had to debug and send the corrected code back to them, and each one whittled away at the site's performance, stability, etc...

    Amazing.

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  20. Why do people who work for Gannett still send this blog this type of information?

    People should know that the author of this blog will post just about anything they think will attract traffic. Making these types of decisions is the very reason why the writer of this blog is unemployed today. People should know this.

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Jim says: "Proceed with caution; this is a free-for-all comment zone. I try to correct or clarify incorrect information. But I can't catch everything. Please keep your posts focused on Gannett and media-related subjects. Note that I occasionally review comments in advance, to reject inappropriate ones. And I ignore hostile posters, and recommend you do, too."

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