Unique Visitors

Freddy, when would newspapers die out if the Internet didn't exist?

 

Say your circ is 20k, and you get 15,000 unique visitors online, that is great!

That means you have a base both in print and online. Some of those numbers will surely overlap, but others are separate readers.

On a long enough timeline unique visitors spiral out of control.

Compare daily unique visitors to weekly, weekly to monthly, monthly to yearly.

I bet your monthly unique visitors are 5-7 times your circulation. Because people from all over come and see a link, or an interesting article. It is really a good thing.

 

Consider, if you will, the words of Warren Buffett in his 2006 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders:
<blockquote>As long ago as my 1991 letter to shareholders, I nonetheless asserted that this insulated world was changing, writing that “the media businesses . . . will prove considerably less marvelous than I, the industry, or lenders thought would be the case only a few years ago.” Some publishers took umbrage at both this remark and other warnings from me that followed. Newspaper properties, moreover, continued to sell as if they were indestructible slot machines. In fact, many intelligent newspaper executives who regularly chronicled and analyzed important worldwide events were either blind or indifferent to what was going on under their noses.

Now, however, almost all newspaper owners realize that they are constantly losing ground in the battle for eyeballs. Simply put, if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed. . . .

However, the economic potential of a newspaper internet site – given the many alternative sources of information and entertainment that are free and only a click away – is at best a small fraction of that existing in the past for a print newspaper facing no competition.</blockquote>
It wasn't just the Internet. Even if you could make the Internet go away, it wouldn't make things better. Newspapers transitioning to online have to learn to compete, which they didn't have to do before.

 

Here's what I consider worthwhile information (info that certain web stat providers can offer ...): WHERE the unique visitors are. No, not their exact addresses -- but what town they are in.

At my job before my current one, we had the ability to see how many unique visitors were from a town. It listed them. Culling that told us that certain sub-sites attracted WAY more "out of subscription" traffic than others.

rb

 

Google Analytics

 

i punched in my ip address into a search tool that sounds similar to what you're describing and it shows me as being from somewhere in new jersey. ip addresses track the server's location, not necessarily the user's location. also, because i'm using verizon internet anywhere, the ip address changes.

 

Yep. I had a blog and checked some visitor stats, and every time a friend in Birmingham read the blog, it showed her as being in New York. That's where her company's headquarters are.

 

Funny I look at my hometown newspaper. All the marketing in the world won't send me somewhere else. The only thing that will get me reading a story elsewhere is good writing.

 

Good question. Not in our lifetimes and maybe never.
No extinction was "hastened" by the 'Net, cause no extinction was scheduled or anticipated.

 

Take my area. Plenty of snowbirds who leave town during the winter. Before the Internet, I'm sure some of them had the paper mailed to them, but not many subscriptions that way. Or maybe someone in town sent them clips.

Now, snowbirds can get daily updates (I'm at a twice-weekly). Plus former residents can get news too. I make daily visits to the papers in the cities I lived in. People in neighboring towns with their own paper are a likely audience as well. Our area of focus with Web sites is a lot larger than our circulation areas.

 

It's pointless to grouse about how we could have continued selling old news on dead trees indefinitely, were it not for the mean ol' Internet. Horses-and-buggies worked great for a long time. So did butter churns, telegraphs and 8-tracks. Then technology and society evolved.

Regarding newspaper websites being "ultimately profitable," take a look at your P&L sometime. I have ours in front of me. Even in this miserable economy, our online revenue is up 38 percent this year, with >50% profit. If we stopped printing tomorrow, we'd lay off 90% of our employees and move to a much smaller building, but a profitable business would continue to exist. Fortunately, we don't have to stop printing tomorrow, but we will do so someday -- maybe 5 years from now, maybe 15. It would behoove us to be as prepared as possible for that inevitability.

Finally, in response to the original post on this thread: Due to that >50% profit margin, we haven't laid off one member of our online staff this year. None in the newsroom, none in sales, none in IT. "How's that internet working out?" Just fine, thank you. How's that print working out?

 

Metin

That's great, you're internet revenue is up 38%

But I bet it doesn't come close to the loss the paper's sustained in the print size. And I bet that internet revenue couldn't pay enough people to write the copy you need for your website.