Feb

7

Numbers matter

Posted by Vera Haller on Feb 7, 2008 under: business, newspapers, online news 

With The New York Times leading its business section today with a big story about gloom, doom and the newspaper industry, it seems more pressing than ever to figure out how to make news Web sites more profitable.

The bottom line is clear. The key to improving profits is the ability to charge higher advertising rates which, in the case of Web sites, are linked to the amount of traffic.

This is where it gets murky. Tracking Web traffic seems to me to be a very imperfect science. I don’t pretend to be an expert here so I was happy to find an interview in Editor & Publisher with the head of Nielsen’s online unit that attempts to explain how tracking is done.

Comments

One Response to “Numbers matter”

  1. Chaeun Park on February 15th, 2008 2:41 pm

    It’s really a strange thing with reading news online because we completely take it for granted that most sites provide free access for recent news, while we would never think of just grabbing a paper for free at the newsstand. I really can’t blame any news companies for wanting to find ways to profit from their Web sites. As for tracking Web traffic, I’m really not sure how that can be made accurate. I may be wrong but I think there are even jobs out there to just click on Web sites nonstop so that they can have more hits.

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