Whilst many online trade publications drive their revenue directly from page views, it’s apparent to savvy advertisers that not all page views are equal. Those sneaky iPhone or Android stories that bump up the views from search engine traffic that is clearly not targeted to the advertisers’ desired audience are one example of why we need to think beyond growing page views.
John Ridding, CEO of the Financial Times, recently highlighted the issue, saying that, “Broad measures of traffic don’t cut it in our world. Depth of our relationship, frequency of visits, readership, return on those readers… [That’s] what advertisers and more sophisticated players are increasingly [focused on].” Read more here…
Ridding also recently talked about the move of newspapers to place content behind paywalls.Paywalls are fabulous indicators of the quality of online pageviews, but a very challenging model when the content is available from other sources. It’s unlikely that we will see many trade publications take this route, as they will have to move away from the current model of predominantly using manufacturers’ content to one of providing deep insight an opinion. Ridding does a great job of highlighting the many new skills that publishers have to develop to run sites that use paywalls.