AP Shows Up ~ a Decade Late for the Portal Party

Over the past two weeks we’ve covered the controversy that the hoary old Associated Press itself may be partly responsibility for killing off the print newspapers that own it; followed closely by the angry threat from the AP to hold Internet search, portal and aggregation companies accountable for allegedly stealing its Intellectual Property via headlines & abstracts.

Earlier today, my Bnet colleague Erik Sherman, who has been following the AP’s moves from a technology Industry perspective, suggested that the AP appears to be intent on creating its own news portal, fueled by ad revenue via a partnership with QuadrantOne, an ad network owned by those oh-so-savvy four Internet horsemen — Gannett, Hearst, The New York Times, and the Tribune Co.

Anyone who studies online ad models will tell you that unless you can scale your site to truly impressive traffic numbers, ads aren’t going to provide impressive returns. So, I thought it would be useful to see how the AP’s own site, in preparation for this new opportunity, has been performing vs. the competition.

Over the past year, according to the metrics service Compete, AP.org has lost 11.78 percent of its modest audience, weighing in with 2,618,203 unique visitors for March. This places the AP as #653 on the Top List of web sites.

During the same period, Reuters.com grew by 35.26 percent to attain the rank of #172 with 7,212,343 uniques in March.

So far, so bad. Reuters has a rather substantial lead on the AP.

It gets worse, however. Coming up fast behind the AP is PR Newswire, with 1,236,404 uniques in March, for an annual growth rate of  19.31 percent, and a ranking of #1,532. Growing even faster is the smaller but aggressive Business Wire with 784,786 uniques last month for a ranking of #2,478.

As yet another way to view the AP’s performance, The Huffington Post (#223) has 2.3 times as large an audience as the AP — 6,021,571.

Guys, this train has long since left the station! Set aside all the “fair use” problems with AP’s new approach, unless it can figure out how to reverse its site’s dismal traffic performance, there won’t be enough ad revenue accruing there to even buy one of my antique Royal typewriters, let alone sustain a new business model.