Guess what. There’s starting to be glimmer of hope for some of the top U.S. newspapers, although it’s buried in a metric that remains unfamiliar to most execs: time on site.
But first, today’s industry news is dominated by the huge red tide sweeping through this sector (23 of the nation’s 25 top dailies reported significant year-over-year losses in circulation for their Sunday editions in Q-1, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations report released this morning. Here’s a few of the lowlights:
Newspaper Name — Change from Q-1 ‘07 to Q-1 ‘08
THE NEW YORK TIMES: (-9.26%)
LOS ANGELES TIMES: (-6.06%)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE: (-4.46%)
THE WASHINGTON POST: (-4.39%)
DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK: (-9.20%)
So, that’s the bad news, and it is indeed grim. But on to the better news. Nielsen Online released a study Friday indicating that 11 of the top 30 newspaper websites experienced an increase in time spent on site (TOS) by users in Q-1.
Winners included The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal Online, Village Voice Media, the Houston Chronicle, and Politico. In order to learn from these gains, content execs need to examine which features on their web sites are proving to be the stickiest.
In many cases, interface design and navigation can be more important factors in TOS than content, per se. At Salon in the late ’90s, for example, we implemented page breaks in long articles that previously had to be read by scrolling. That created an opportunity to write compelling subheads (”NEXT: What brand of cigar did she use, anyway?”), as well as new banner advertising revenue, of course.
Most news sites face a tricky tradeoff between their search v. browsing capability. Newspapers have been especially slow to comprehend that their content is essentially a bundles of keywords that should be easily searchable by relevance and date.
Too often, they rely on taxonomies that worked half a century ago, but seem tired and boring to the average web user today. These issues can be addressed by smart web design at both the interface and visual levels, but most newspapers cling to their old paradigms, with something resembling a death grip.
Watch for the disparity between the winners and losers of the TOS ratings for which news companies will be more likely to make a successful transition to online publishing in the months and years ahead. There are so many things to study — page views, return visits, ad click-through rates, multimedia platforms, free registration metrics, SEO, and various Web 2.0 applications that exploit innovative distribution arrangements.
But good old TOS remains a reliable marker as to how you are doing as a content provider. Good content is sticky — produce it, and the rest of what you need for success will follow.
